


The Tomorrow People

by Ramen_and_Manuscripts



Category: I Don't Know How But They Found Me (Band)
Genre: Government Experimentation, Insane Dallon, M/M, Magic, Magic and Science, Razzmatazz, Unimpressed Ryan, White Shadows
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:49:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27676981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ramen_and_Manuscripts/pseuds/Ramen_and_Manuscripts
Summary: The Eternal Waiting room; it was merely an urban legend, a far-fetched explanation for where all of those people seem to keep disappearing to. Ryan didn't believe in it until he himself was snatched away from his life and his loved ones and stuck in there himself. He's about ready to give up and accept what's on the other side of the door when a man named Dallon steps in and turns his worldview on his head with claims of magic and things that he's seen that haven't happened yet.---I'm bad at summaries but basically it's a fic about Tellexx and what it might be. It's been super fun to write, hopefully it's fun to read too.
Relationships: Ryan Seaman/Dallon Weekes
Comments: 112
Kudos: 56





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hahaha look at me go writing something that I didn't ever think I would post. But I wrote too much and stuff so here ya go. I might literally delete it if I feel like it. 
> 
> DISCLAIMER: I based this off of the boys' music video persona's NOT the real people. I am portraying characters, only similar to the real people by name.

The eternal waiting room. Ryan hadn’t believed that it existed when he'd first heard of it; it's a bit of an urban legend passed along to explain where the people would go when they disappeared. He didn’t believe much of _anything_ they would say to explain it. The government would try to convince him that they’d never existed in the first place, or that they’d transferred, or moved. Co-workers of his would insist they were all a part of a conspiracy and that they were spies that took on new identities every few years. Others would tell him that they were war criminals that had to be killed discreetly in order to raise less suspicion. There were many many theories, but of course the one that lurked under the skin of everyone who’d heard it(and everyone had), was the eternal waiting room. A place they all went to anticipate their retribution, assuming they had done something wrong.

But he hadn’t done anything wrong, and here he is. 

Ryan scans the other faces in the room. Most of them are gaunt, like his, some smiling, unlike his. There’s nothing to smile about. 

A faux cheerful melody echoes through the room, seemingly played on an off tune xylophone.

Dammit. The intercom crackles and Ryan buries his face in his hands. 

“Subject J215, would you kindly come to the door please?” A stately announcer’s voice booms over the loud-speaker. Earlier in the week(?) it had been a comfort, reminiscent of the PSAs that littered his childhood. “The future is now.” they said, “We’re living in the golden age of humankind.” they said, “You’re the face of tomorrow.” they said. Everything was so bright, and new, and tantalizing. When Ryan heard the faceless voice as a child he’d be excited to hear of the exploits of inventors and innovations and trips to the moon. 

Now it’s only another patronizingly dull part of this agonizingly dull purgatory. 

A scant woman, apparently J215, stands up and shuffles to the door™, clutching a ragged blanket around her shoulders like a cape, a hero in another life or another world.

Ryan looks down at his wrist. Tiny, crooked characters etch _ R402 _ into his skin forever. He’s waiting, like everyone else here. He’s been waiting for what feels like months. Could be months. Could be years. Logically, it’s probably only been a few days, but no one actually knows. There are no windows, or clocks. When they were brought here, they were stripped of their clothes, hosed down, and given new ones. They look like hospital scrubs or prison jumpsuits, maybe a strange hybrid of both. It consists of an uncomfortable blouse-like top in a shade of medical mask blue, and loose trousers that have a shoelace in the waistband so the wearer can adjust. No underwear. Their things were taken away. Ryan’s phone, money, wallet, watch, the change in his pocket and the picture of his girlfriend were all thrown into the incinerator in front of his eyes. He cried then, but he hasn’t since. He’s conditioned not to cry in front of people, even though he’s in a situation where no one will either notice or care. 

After he was pressure washed and redressed, they heated four brands that looked like the letters you’d find on an old-timey printing press, and quickly(haphazardly) pressed them to the thin skin on his wrist. It hurt like  _ hell _ but his hard-wired defiance kept him from crying out. Then, he and a line of other men were shafted into  _ here _ and it’s been nothing ever since. 

The child’s tune burns his ears again. Time goes by in a strange sprinting crawl. He can’t tell if it’s really been the estimated 10 minutes between each call, or if it’s only been two, or if it’s been an hour. There’s no way to tell, except by counting each individual second. Ryan lost the patience for that kind of thing days(?) ago.

“Subject E309, would you kindly come to the door please?”   


  
Ryan’s eyes search for the next victim, and it isn’t difficult to spot them. A wave of sound comes from a few rows down. They, a young boy, are pushed encouragingly from behind. He grins, excited, and waves goodbye to his friends. They’re laughing, shouting, whooping. Ryan pities them. Making friends is dangerous if you may never see them again.

And, apparently he’s unapproachable. The people here have mostly paired off or found little clumps and clots that sit on the floor in cuddle piles or circles, playing games and kissing and reminiscing and hoping.    
  


He could go to them, he supposes. Pass the time. He just finds he has no desire to, which is strange, because he considers himself an extrovert. 

For a while he watches a group of people play an  _ exhilarating _ game of quack-diddly-oso, but he’s snapped out of his mindless staring by the sound of heavy metal bolts being moved magnetically, the doors unlocking. On either side of the far wall in the long room, two doors open and each procures a row of new prisoners, shiny, wide-eyed and afraid. Ryan sighs. 

How depressing this all is. They all desperately try to find a place where they fit, like it’s the first day of high school. They settle into the seats of ghosts, smiling nervously at the filth around them and hoping for acceptance. Ryan refuses to concede to the delusions that everything is okay or normal. This isn’t a summer camp or a job interview, it’s the end of their lives. 

Ryan likes to watch them fall into place from afar, as to him it’s a strange and interesting study of behaviour. 

But he didn’t expect one of them to start approaching him. They never do that. 

But there one is, standing over him and radiating semi-emaciated beauty. Too thin, far too thin to look properly new here. Squat cupid’s bow lips bitten bloody, eyes sunken into his face, dark hair wild and wet(from the ‘showers’), fingers twitching as if he can’t control them. Bony shoulders, thin face, long legs, so so tall. Ryan’s craning his neck, looking up. For a moment neither of them speak. Ryan’s in his cast shadow and therefore under his spell, so he waits for him to say something first.    
  
“Can I sit next to you?” His voice is thin and raspy as if he’d been shouting for hours. Ryan doesn’t know what to say. 

“Uh.”   
  
The man’s face flashes with alarm (panic?) and Ryan sputters, holding his hands out in a placating gesture. “Yes, of course. Sorry.”

“Um.” He says, holding his arms (thin so thin why is he already so thin) against his chest. “Thank you.”

When he sits down, Ryan notices that the standard issue trousers are too small for him, exposing multiple inches of skin on his ankle, the grippy socks they’d been supplied slouching around the top of his feet due to faulty elastic. He must be freezing. Ryan instinctively glances around for a blanket. He doesn’t see any not being used already and it irritates him for a reason that Ryan doesn’t know. He doesn’t know this guy, and he refuses to get to know him. He hunkers down in his chair, hugging himself. 

“Um.” The guy pipes up a few minutes after he’d sat. “My name is Dallon, what’s yours?”   
  
Ryan grunts and turns, displaying his wrist. “We’re numbers now.”   
  
“You remember your name, though.” He says. It isn’t a question. Dallon rubs his own inflamed wrist without looking at it. 

“Um. Yeah, I guess.”   
  
“What is it?” Ryan looks strangely at the man. He looks back, intensely. Ryan has to look away.   
  
“Ryan.”

“I like that name,” Dallon says wistfully, smiling in a traitorously joyful way “It’s pretty.”   
  
“And goddamn common. I’ve known so many Ryans.” He’d never thought of his name as pretty, on the contrary, he thinks it’s rather plain.    
  
“I’ll bet you anything you’ve never met a Dallon!” Dallon grins. Ryan relents an uneasy smile but nothing else. He doesn’t want to make small talk. He doesn’t want to know any of these people.

Not even this one. 

“Sooo.” Dallon searches for the next thing to say to his unwilling conversation partner. He senses that Dallon doesn’t think this is awkward at all, despite Ryan’s clear ‘get away from me’ body language. While he searches for a topic, he looks around at the empty walls, and then the empty corners. He sees the intercom, the door, the water fountains, the single door to the bathroom, and the 10ish rows of black and uncomfortable airport chairs. He’s now seen everything. “How long have you been here?”

  
  
“Dunno.”

  
  
“Haven’t been putting score marks on the walls?”

  
  
“No windows. No way to tell.”

  
  
“Huh. Right.”

The xylophone’s death rattle screams over the speakers and Ryan smacks his forehead. Dallon looks minutely alarmed.

  
  
“Subject H487, would you kindly come to the door, please?”

  
  
Ryan doesn’t even look this time, only throwing his face into his palms, pressing down on his eyes until he sees swirling psychedelic patterns. It doesn’t stop Dallon from inquiring gently from somewhere above him.    


  
“What’s on the other side of the door?”

  
  
“Dunno.”

  
  
“Hum. How often do they call someone in?” 

“Dunno.”

  
  
“You have to have an estimate.”   


  
Ryan snaps out of his dark world, turning to glare at the man on his right.“I don’t know, dude! Like- maybe 20 minutes? More or less. New groups come to replace the people we lose, eventually.”   
  


“Hum.” Dallon seems unperturbed at his raised voice. “Do  _ you _ want to be called in?”   
  
Ryan opens his mouth, closes it again. It’s a question he’d avoided when lost in thought. Does he? He’s 99 percent sure that what lies beyond that door is death. There might be a sort of data collection or experiment or something too, because if there was no reason for seeing each individual then they could just gas the waiting room and be done with it. But even with that knowledge, Ryan doesn’t want to be here anymore. So yes he thinks he does want to be called, if only to hold on to the desperate hope that there will be a bit of clarity in there before his time is over. 

But does he want to die? No. He just thinks it will be preferable to  _ waiting _ to die and thinking about all the things he’d wished he’d done before all this shit. 

“Yeah. I think.”

“Interesting.” Dallon taps his lips with his index finger absentmindedly. “Do you… know why you’re here?”   
  
“No, of course not.” Ryan scoffs, hugging his right knee to his chest, relishing in the stretch.. “As far as I know no one does.”   
  


“I do.”   
  
Ryan’s leg shoots back down, his heel hitting the cold tile floor with a painful  _ thwack.  _ “Excuse me?”

  
  
Dallon shrugs, flexing his twitching fingers, drawing Ryan’s attention to them. 

“Watch carefully.” He says, a mischievous smile haunting his symmetrical features. And Ryan does, feeling utterly stupid, but curious despite himself. Dallon snaps his fingers once, and it’s as if he’d set off one of those baby popper fireworks you’d throw on the ground during the fourth of July. A flash of blinding light, silver and sparkling, burns bright for a millisecond and then it’s gone as if nothing had happened at all. Ryan only knows he hadn’t hallucinated it because when he blinks the after image is still burnt into his eyelids. 

“What the hell?”

“Magic. All of us.” He whispers conspiratorially, leaning far too close to Ryan’s face (but Ryan doesn’t register this in his haste to process his words) “They’re getting scared. Those blood tests mandated a while ago? There’s something that all magic users have in their plasma that they’d identified. They’re slowly gathering us all.”

  
  
“Woah, woah-” Ryan finally figures out that Dallon’s face is a mere two inches away from his and backs off, placing his hand, palm up, to make him back away too. He does, but he looks a bit put out. “Magic?”   


  
“I showed you.” He seems hurt that Ryan doesn’t believe him, but in all honesty, Ryan’s just a bit slow at the least opportune times. 

  
  
“No, no yeah. I saw.” Ryan says, keeping both of his hands up as a pseudo barrier between the two of them. “I definitely saw I’m just- what?”

He lowers both of Ryan’s hand’s gently, grabbing both of his wrists. “Magic, Ryan. You’re magic.”

  
  
“No, definitely not. I can’t be. That’s something I would-- know. Right?”

“Not necessarily. You’d need to know how to wield it.” Dallon whispers excitedly, “I can help you, you can  _ learn _ -”

Ryan jerks his arms out of the man’s grip, and as he expected, it breaks easily. Dallon stops talking, sits back, eyes worried. 

  
  
“You said that we all had that-that- blood thing, right? Go recruit someone else. I’m not dealing with this shit.”

  
  
Dallon takes a deep breath and sinks back into his chair, facing forward and away from Ryan. He makes no move to leave. It annoys Ryan. 

Dallon shivers again, pulling both of his knees into his chest. That annoys Ryan more. 

“I’m finding you a blanket.” Ryan says gruffly, standing up. Dallon looks up at him, blank and confused.    


  
“Alright.”

  
  
“Subject W139, would you kindly come to the door, please?”

Ryan paces the aisles, stepping over sleeping bodies and friends with shoulders pressed together, whispering despite the lack of need for it. He makes a circuit of the room, falling into step with the walkers and the pacers, the restless who can’t sleep or sit still. Eventually he finds a black blanket, rolled up and stuffed under a chair. It’s probably someone’s that they kept there so no one like Ryan would snatch it, but honestly at this point Ryan doesn’t care. 

He grabs it and loops it over his arm as if it were some sort of cocoon. When he makes it back to Dallon, he plops it onto his lap without a word. Dallon blinks down at it. 

“Thank you.”   
  
“Yeah, maybe you’ll stop shivering now. It’s annoying.”   
  
Dallon laughs delicately, pulling himself into a ball and tucking the scrap around his body the best he can. Ryan finds it endearing, and that’s also annoying.

The two fall into a merciful silence. Ryan feels himself drifting off, which is rare. He wishes he could sleep more. 

“So.” Dallon starts again, piercing the humming quiet. Ryan grunts in irritation. 

“I’m trying to sleep.”

  
  
“Awe, I’m not even tired.”

  
  
“I  _ am _ .”   
  


The blanket-ball named Dallon shifts to face Ryan again. “You sleep on the chair?”

  
  
“Why the hell do you ask so many goddamn questions?”

  
  
“I like to know things.”

  
  
“I like to be left alone.”

  
  
He laughs, staring unnervingly into his eyes, Ryan somehow can’t look away. “No you don’t.”

  
  
“You don’t know me.”   
  


He blinks a few times, an incongruous smile still stuck onto his face. “I would like to!”

  
  
“Dude.” Ryan straightens his posture to look at the guy, nonplussed. “We are being sent to our deaths.”

  
  
“I will not die.” He says, confident beyond any rational human being should be. “And I wish to save you.”   
  


Ryan is just floored by the man’s attitude, begging himself to lay back down to go to sleep, but still staring at him despite that. Dallon grins and withdraws a hand from his cocoon, manifesting glittery light at his fingertips, lazy and dull, but undoubtedly there. Ryan stares. Dallon pulls his fingers into a fist and the lights go out. 

  
  
Ryan can finally breathe and move, flopping down to stare at the blinding lights on the ceiling.

“I don’t need to be saved, Dallon.”

He doesn’t get an answer. He falls asleep seconds later.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so stressed my deadline for college apps is on freaking december first and i'm writing shit like this instead of life-altering essays but wow hi how are you
> 
> Idk why i write anything in these boxes cause no one reads it but I hope you like the next chapter!

“Good morning!”

  
  
“Tessa?” Ryan asks croakily, rolling away from the hand on his shoulder and pulling the blanket over his head.

“No, it’s me.” The voice is male. Not Tessa then. He sits up, shoulders and back aching like hell, and slowly opens his eyes. Incredibly close to his face is a skeleton. He yelps and scrambles back, his shoulder hitting something pointy. He gasps and clutches it, blinking. 

“I’m sorry I scared you, I just thought you’d be hungry.”    


  
Ryans vision blearily comes back into focus, and the events of what happened before he went to sleep are renewed in his mind. The thing that woke him was not, in fact, a skeleton, but a man. Dallon. He’s waving a ration bar at him and clutching one of his own bare ankles with a large hand. 

  


“- thought I got you a blanket.” He reaches out and Dallon places the bar in his hands.    


  
“I let you use it.” He says, and Ryan looks down at his blanket tangled legs, feeling stupid for not figuring that out on his own. “Also, I hope you don’t mind, I moved you to the floor. These chairs aren’t any good for sleeping.”   


  
Ryan looks at him strangely. He’d picked him up, laid him down, and then put his blanket over him when he was clearly more in need of it? Why is he doing this?   


  
“Um. No. Thanks? I guess.”

  
  
“Those white guys are creepy, huh? They almost didn’t leave a granola bar for you.”

  
“And you-asked for one?”

  
  
“Well yeah, I thought you’d need it.”

“And they--gave it to you?”

  
  
“Who’s the question guy now?” Dallon teases lightly, smirking. Ryan peels open his ration bar slowly, wary eyes on the puppy-like man in front of him. It’s strange. It’s like he’d deliberately seeked Ryan out. He doesn’t  _ know  _ this man, does he?   
  


Ryan looks closely at him, tries to imagine him with a bit more skin on his bones. It does no good. Ryan would have remembered someone so visually enchanting. 

“Are you alright?”

  
  
“Yeah I’m fine, just-” Ryan takes a bite of his bar, chewing it thoroughly. Dallon’s found something interesting in the creases of the floor tiles, totally enraptured by absolutely nothing. “Why are you-”   


  
Ryan is interrupted by the chime (the goddamn chime) and the voice calls C893 to the door™. 

Dallon turns his attention back to the floor and Ryan takes another bite of the bar. It tastes like nothing and the texture is reminiscent of glue and sawdust. He supposes it’s the bare minimum to keep them alive. It doesn’t do much to satiate the gnawing hunger in his stomach. On the contrary, it reminds him that he is, in fact, starving, and there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it. He stuffs the rest into his mouth and swallows it as quick as he can without choking. The less he thinks about it the better he feels. 

“They aren’t very good.” Dallon says, again trying to start a conversation. It’s absolutely puzzling.

“No. They aren’t.” Ryan crumples the wrapper and throws it to the side. “ I’d rather be on death row, I could at least get a good final meal.”   
  
“Hum. Well, I told you I wasn’t going to let you die.”   
  


Instead of answering or reacting to his absurd claim, Ryan pulls the blanket out from around his legs and hands it back to Dallon, who drapes it over his knees with a tiny muttered thanks. How can someone so large look so incredibly small?

“What happens if your number gets called while you're sleeping?”

  
  
Ryan sighs, closing his eyes again and craning his neck to rest it on the seat behind him. “I’m pretty sure I saw one of the white things come in and grab one. Usually people have a companion or friend that’ll wake them up by the time a person is called.”

“Oh, okay. My number is D308.” Dallon flashes his still nasty-looking burn at Ryan, nearly blinding him with a quick full toothed smile.

  
  
“D308,” Ryan says, thinking out loud, “Dallon. R402, Ryan.”

  
  
“Yeah, I noticed that. That’s pretty neat, huh?”

  
  
“Neat.” Ryan echoes, mystified. Not at his own realization, but at the man’s usage of the word  _ neat _ like he was a kid from a boring classic book that he’d been forced to read in school.

Dallon reads like a fantasy character, magic and all. 

“Has anyone tried jumping one of the guards?”

“No, and you’re not going to either.” Ryan says firmly, “Everything’s run by machines, there’s nothing they could do to help us.”

  
  
“No key cards like the movies, then.” Dallon looks up, around. I want to tell him that he won’t see anything that he hasn’t already. “Then there must be cameras.”

  
  
“I don’t think there are.” Ryan shrugs, “I think I would have seen them.”

  
  
“They can be small,” He says, standing up and adjusting his blanket to wear it like a skirt. And then bafflingly, he offers his arm. “Walk with me?”   
  


“I- um-”

  
  
“I need to stretch my legs,” He offers as an explanation. Carefully, Ryan makes his way to his feet. He ignores Dallon’s outstretched arm, brushing past him to walk along his usual circuit.    
  


Dallon takes this all in stride, simply shrugging and walking at his side. Ryan’s head hurts.

Oh how he wishes for darkness, so dearly. If you can hear past the buzz of the people you can hear the buzz of the lights- blinding blue, the opposite of warm or sleepy. It makes it harder to sleep, sometimes harder to think, and Ryan thinks that’s probably the point. 

If there’s even a point.

Dallon scans the trim on the wall, he looks up into the corners where two walls and the ceiling meet, and likewise with the floor. He checks the door™’s door frame (Ryan pulls him away) above the water fountain, and the doorframe of the bathroom. He then retreats  _ into _ the bathroom, and immediately leaves when he sees the immense line. Ryan smirks at him when he emerges from the frey.   


  
“How’s it going, Sherlock?”

  
  
“There are no visible cameras.”

  
  
“That’s what I said, wasn’t it?” Ryan says shortly, allowing Dallon to grab his elbow, albeit reluctantly. He still doesn’t understand the attachment that Dallon seems to have to him. 

  
  
They’re on their second lap, because walking feels good right now. “Would you say you’re a people person?”

  
  
“Generally,” Ryan shrugs, “Yeah.”

  
  
“I’m not. Most people don’t like me.”

  
  
“Oh,” Ryan says somewhat cruelly, “I wonder why.”

  
  
But Dallon apparently doesn’t pick up on it. He’s either really stupid, or he just doesn’t care. “Me too! I’m a pretty cool person.”

  
  
To amend for his jerkiness, Ryan pats Dallon’s hand and says, “Yeah, you are.”   
  


“Thank you very much.”   


Ryan stifles a fond laugh because no he isn’t. 

After their fourth lap around the room, they started getting annoyed looks from the people they’d repeatedly stepped over (or on, in Dallon’s case), so they reclaimed their seats on the back wall. Dallon re-wraps himself in his blanket, not looking upset or dejected in the slightest, which isn’t entirely fair since he was so excited at the prospect of cameras just 10 minutes ago. Ryan doesn’t get it. 

And how in the hell does Dallon never run out of things to talk about? A conversation ends comfortably and he just starts another one. Ryan would usually envy him, but in this situation, he’s starting to want to tell him to shut up. 

“Did you have any pets?”   
  
“Yeah, I had a dog.”   
  
“Nice! I’m more of a cat person myself---”

And 

“What did you do for work?”

  
  
“I was a computer technician, worked from home.”

“Neat! I was still in college. English major.”

“Wow, cool.”   


  
And

“Who’s Tessa?”   
  
Ryan’s head snaps over to Dallon, face heating in anger. He looks back quizzically, bundled up, and Ryan’s fury drops from a tempest to more of a tropical storm at the sight of him in such a vulnerable state. He shakes his head viciously to clear it of pink hair and radiant smiles. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about it.”   
  
“Ah.” He says, sadly, picking at his cuticles, attempting to meet Ryan’s eyes. Ryan refuses, so Dallon ventures- “Must be your wife.” 

“Girlfriend, actually.” Ryan grunts, fully turning his body away from the conversation. 

“You must be worried about her.”   
  
Ryan shrugs. He’s sad he’d never gotten to say goodbye, upset at the unfairness, simultaneously hoping that she doesn’t grieve too long and that she grieves forever. Realistically, he knows she’ll move on pretty fast. 3 years isn’t that long, in the scheme of things. 

He doesn’t really want to think about it. He supposes he won’t have to, when he’s dead. 

...

He wants his number called. Now.

  
So when the next chime blares over the speaker, he wishes for it. Dallon snaps his fingers suddenly, creating another flash of light, and Ryan’s head turns to finally meet the other’s eye in the split second before-

“Subject T597, would you kindly come to the door, please?”

  
  
Ryan tries not to betray any disappointment, looking down at his knees. He sees Dallon look at his own in not-hidden disappointment. Ryan can’t tell what he’s disappointed with. Does he want his number called too? Does he want  _ Ryan’s  _ number called?

No, Ryan’s pretty sure that that isn’t true.

“My therapist called me crazy.” 

  
  
“What?” Ryan has to pull himself out of the void of his thoughts. Ryan turns to Dallon, observes the tiredness of his eyes and the downturn of his lips. 

“I think I might be, a little. But not when it comes to this, Ryan. I can see things happen before they do. I can do little optical illusions, sure, but the real power is in here.”

  
  
He points to his brain, a tap of the index finger.   


  
“And here.”

  
  
He points to his eyes, two fingers, nearly ready to gouge. 

Ryan nods slowly, unsure of what he means, not entirely disagreeing with the man’s therapist. A spark of something flashes through Dallon’s eyes, and suddenly he looks angry.

“See? You think I’m crazy too.”   
  


“I didn’t say that.”

He lunges forward, grabbing both of Ryan’s hands and letting the blanket drop from around his shoulders. Ryan is so shocked that he doesn’t even think to move away.

  
  
“I  _ saw _ you, Ryan. I saw you.” That same desperation that Dallon had worn so openly the first time he’d asked to sit down next to him comes back in full force. It’s raw and festering like roadkill getting picked apart by crows. It’s too vulnerable for Ryan. He has to look away. Dallon looks at their joined hands, continuing. “We- it was dark and there were all of these laser lights, like at those school dances and you were there and you were, I was  _ bleeding _ , I think and you were fixing me.”

  
  
“I’m not a doctor.”

  
  
“No.” He says in agreement, bringing one of Ryan’s hands nearly into his lap, tracing the creases on his palm. “I think you’re a healer.”

  
  
“Oh, you’re talking about  _ magic _ again.”   
  


“ _ Yes _ ,” Dallon says exasperatedly, “Yes. Yes. You have to trust me.”

  
  
“I don’t  _ know you,  _ Dallon! You may have seen someone who looks like me in a dream, but that doesn’t mean that it is. It doesn’t mean that you’re...like...seeing the future!”

“My neck.” Dallon says, ignoring Ryan’s protests. “It was cut, and you had your hand here.”   


  
He guides Ryan’s hand to rest on the side of his throat, soft and unassuming. “And you were trying to stop the bleeding.”

  
  
“So? Anyone could do that. That isn’t-”   


  
“Let me finish. I felt myself dying. I know what it feels like, and I felt myself  _ dying _ and then I felt warm. It stopped bleeding, Ryan.  _ You _ made it stop.”

  
  
Ryan can feel Dallon swallow. He brings his hand back, staring at it, still feeling the lines Dallon had traced into it, still feeling the phantom warmth of the skin of his neck. And he realizes that he wants to be who Dallon thinks he is. He wants it, desperately, even if there’s no real reason  _ why _ .

But he knows he isn’t. He balls his hand into a fist, erasing any lingering sensation. “No. No. You can’t- hinge your sanity on me. Your-- delusions that I will in some future you’ve dreamed up, save your life. You can’t believe that we’ll live through this just because you think that something has to happen.”   


  
“I don’t think, Ryan, I know. I know things, that’s my div.”

  
  
“Div?”

  
  
“Division. Light magic, premonitions-” He sounds like he was going to say something else, but stops himself, leaving the sentence hanging in midair. Ryan doesn’t particularly care.

  
  
“Okay, okay. You said that-- blood. We have something in our blood that makes us different.”

“Hypothetically.”   
  
“Then how would not a single one of us in here except for you know that they’re magic?”

“I feel like some of them do, but are afraid to show it. Some magic would be useless here, like alchemists. The only reason I can do anything is because there’s light.”   


  
“So if I were a healer-”

“You’d just need something to heal.” Dallon whispers, leaning in close. “Can we try?”

“There’s no way we could hurt ourselves in here, I think they did that on purpose.”   


  
But Dallon isn’t listening, he’s sucking the light out from around his fingers, creating a straight thin line out of glittery glow. And quickly, he drags it across his forearm.   


  
“Dallon! Dude!”

  
  
A cut, entirely too long, blossoms with blood and starts to overflow. Ryan panics and reaches for the blanket to stem the bleeding but Dallon drags it out of his reach.

  
  
“Now’s your chance.”

  
  
“Dude, I’m not magic! There’s no way I can just--heal this with my mind! We need to stop the bleeding. Please.”

  
  
Dallon shakes his head once, grinning like a madman, “Go on, stop it.”

  
  
Ryan wants to punch him, leave him bleeding and go find somewhere quiet to sit. Forget about ever meeting him.

But instead he presses his bare fingers onto the cut. It’s disgusting, and the blood is all over his hands now and he’s sure the bacteria on his skin is making the wound sting like hell. “If you get an infection you can’t blame me.” 

Dallon shrugs, seemingly unperturbed.

He lets both palms encompass it, feeling so stupid for even entertaining any of this. “Now what? What did I do in your dream?”

  
  
“You were crying.”

  
  
“I’m not going to cry because you cut your arm.”

  
  
“Yeah that might not be entirely relevant.” Dallon taps his chin with a hum, “I don’t know.”

  
  
“You don’t  _ know _ ?” Ryan asks, voice raising higher than he’d like it to in hysterics. “Give me the fucking blanket!”

  
  
“No, I’m fine, you’re welcome to practice as long as you need. I can wait.”   
  


“Dallon, this is disgusting.” Ryan lifts one nearly dripping hand up and resists the urge to wipe it on his pants, because they’re the only ones he has. He replaces the hand. “How is it possibly bleeding this much?”

  
  
“I accidentally cut deeper than I meant to.”

“Oh my  _ god _ I’m starting to hate you.” Ryan mutters, trying to concentrate in order to send ‘healing vibes’ or something.  _ Stop bleeding stop bleeding maybe close the cut if I’m actually magic but mostly please stop bleeding?  _

The chime comes over the loudspeaker. 

“Subject R402, would you kindly come to the door please?”

  
  
It takes a second to register because of his preoccupation. His brain went from  _ Dallon  _ to _ blood _ to _ annoying _ to _ oh shit I think that’s me _ .

Dallon looks mildly disappointed. “Awe, dangit, I feel like we were pretty close.”

  
  
“I look like I murdered someone.” Ryan breathes, staring at his hands, now off of Dallon’s arm.

  
  
“Look it stopped bleeding!”   


“I can’t believe I let you talk me into that.”   


  
“Ryan, you were doing it!”

  
  
“No I wasn’t- I- I was applying pressure and that stops bleeding, everyone knows that-”

  
  
“I knew you could do it!”

  
  
“Oh  _ shut up  _ for fucks sake!”   


  
Dallon closes his mouth, looking hurt. Ryan would feel bad, but he knows he’s about to die, and that isn’t really putting him in a good mood. He can’t seem to get up. People are looking around now, it’s been too long, he should have already gone over. The white things are gonna come in and drag him away if he doesn’t get up now, and he doesn’t want them to do that. He stands up, legs shaking. Dallon taps his foot as he passes by. 

That’s their goodbye. 

When people look over to watch him walk up to the door, they see his hands, still slick with blood. Gasps, whispers, the buzz of the lights, the chime playing through his head.

This is his requiem.

He grasps the door handle before he turns it, breathing in and out.

This is his sentence.

He opens the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> k u d o s a n d c o m m e n t : )


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason I thought the IDKhow twitter scavenger hunt would be harder.
> 
> Also this chapter is a bridge so sorry it's like lame and short. 
> 
> Hey ya'll thanks for your support!!! I hope you continue to enjoy :3

He doesn’t know what he was expecting, but he wasn’t expecting this.   
  
Inside the room is what looks like an examination room that you might see in a doctor's office. He jumps when the door closes shut behind him. He’s keyed up, pre-death adrenaline rushing through his veins in anticipation. He can’t calm down. He can’t stop looking, inventorying. Three locked cabinets above a sink. Two, locked, under sink cabinets. A biohazard disposal box on the wall next to it. A bed, paper covered, sits in the middle of the room. A blood pressure pump on the wall next to him. A scale, a height chart. No human person in sight. 

He just stands there, dumbly, for what feels like hours. He forgets about the blood on his hands, because he rubs his face and feels residue slough off onto his cheek.

  
  
“Ugh.”

  
  
“Subject R402.” The voice says, and it snaps Ryan to military position. “You will be momentarily blinded.”

  
  
“What?”

  
A flash of light, similar to Dallon’s but so so so so much brighter and bigger, nearly knocks Ryan off of his feet. 

  
  
As soon as it comes, it leaves. At least, Ryan can sense that much, but his vision is gone and he’s so off balance that he topples backwards. He braces himself to hit the floor but he doesn’t, he falls into someone’s arms. That someone says “Whoops!” And deposits him back onto his feet, leading him by his elbow to what he assumes is the bed. Something is slipped over his eyes and fastened in the back. Ryan’s hands immediately jump to it, trying to take it off, but two hands forcefully grab his own and force them down. They’re cuffed together behind his back before Ryan can blink.

“What’s going on?”

  
  
“A routine check up,” Says the person, their voice sounds fake and modulated, low, gravelly, grating. “We need to make sure you’re healthy for this. What did you do to your hands?”

  
  
“My friend cut himself.” Ryan says through his teeth. “What’s with the blinding, dude?”

  
  
“I am entitled to complete anonymity.”

  
  
“Yeah, and I thought I was entitled to not be imprisoned against my will.”

  
  
A strange mechanical ticking sound that Ryan guesses must be a laugh crawls it’s way into his ears and stays there, like an itch. 

“You’re funny.” The person says while pulling the blouse down Ryan’s shoulders. The cold air hits Ryan’s chest and shoulders and he’s never felt more exposed and helpless. A stethoscope is pressed against his skin, a circle of cold over his heart. He barely suppresses a shiver. Ryan supposes he should say something or fight back, but he’s tired and there’s hardly anything he can do in this situation. He lets the person take his pulse. 

“A RPM of 120.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s not typical, but it appears to be normal for people like you to have higher pulses. I’m going to take your blood now.”

  
  
So is Dallon right? People like him? There’s a common denominator? Is it really magic, or was Dallon crazy and Ryan hallucinating?

“What do you mean, people like me?”

  
  
“I can’t tell you that.” The person says cheerfully, not bothering to pull the shoulders of Ryan’s blouse back up before they flounce away to get the needle, annoying him immensely. The air is cold and his head hurts from the light.

And then they’re back, rubbing wet antiseptic into the crease of his elbow. “I will be taking around one and a half pints, okay?”

  
  
“I’ll absolutely faint.” Ryan says dryly. “So not really.”

  
  
“I wasn’t asking.” They say before piercing his vein. It feels like it goes on forever, the feeling of extraction, like they’re stealing something from him. He can feel the suction compress his arteries. It doesn’t hurt but it’s agonizing.

When they finally untie the tourniquet, Ryan finally feels like he can breathe, but even if he didn’t have a blindfold on, he feels like his vision would be gone anyway. “Can I at least...have some juice or something?”

“Hmm.” Is all he hears, and Ryan resigns. 

He’s brought to his feet and told to stand on a scale. His height is recorded. He sits back down, they take his reflexes. They stick something in his ears, and a swab up his nose, and then another one in his mouth. His temperature is taken. 

“All set.” They say when they’re done and Ryan is wary. He no longer believes he’s gonna die, at least not immediately, because it seems unlikely they’d do all of that just to kill him.

  
  
He’s scared that they’re going to do something worse.

He’s brought to his feet again, but not by the hands of the doctor. The hands are rough and inhuman feeling, but they blessedly replace the neckline of his blouse before they start to steer him out.

  
  
They walk for a while. Ryan can almost feel the laminate through his socks, and can still hear the buzzing of the lights. He knows that they’re in a similar environment to the eternal waiting room. That’s all he can gather. He doesn’t really feel like fighting or talking. He still has blood on his face and hands, he can feel it like a second skin that he just can’t shed. 

  
  
He’s exhausted. All he wants to do is lay down and sleep. If he’s lucky he’ll wake up and this would have all been a dream. Eventually they let him go, make him sit down on something not-quite soft. His wrists are unbound, the thing around his eyes loosened. And then he hears a door close. He tries again to wrench the blindfold off, and is surprised to find that it comes off easily. He stares at it. It looks like a sleep mask with metal straps, a crank in the back must have tightened it to his head, but because of his cuffs he couldn’t even try to take it off. 

He sets the thing down next to him. He’s on a cot, in a glass room. By glass he means  _ glass.  _ The floor, the walls, the cot is made out of a block of glass with a thin bedroll on top of it. The wall with the door is a mirror. One way, he assumes, so they can watch him but he can’t watch them. Lovely. He feels like a lab rat. 

In the corner there’s a door. Ryan stands up to investigate. He opens the door to a room the size of a closet. Inside is a toilet, a sink. No soap. Single ply toilet paper. At least the walls aren’t clear, Ryan thinks bemusedly. He squeezes into the tiny room and runs the water, sticking a pinky under the jet. Ice cold.    


  
“Ugh.”   


  
He lets his fingers acclimate to the temperature, and then starts scrubbing Dallon’s blood away. Despite it being a normal bright, wet, crimson when he’d been trying to stem it’s flow, the blood didn’t dry brown like he’d assume it to. It’s more of a purple. It’s weird but so is Dallon.

He brushes away the urge to smile when he thinks about him. He doesn’t miss him. He doesn’t care about him. He only knew him for two or so days, probably less. 

He rubs water onto his cheek to wash the rest of the blood away. He feels cleaner now, but chilled. He doesn’t want to stay in the tiny room any longer than he has to. Back in the main cell, he looks around again, for cameras, first. One in the corner, one over the door. He looks to either side. There seems to be other cells there, identical in setup. It seems a girl is in one, lying on the bed with her back to Ryan’s cell. The other side is empty. 

The bedroll looks appealing, right now. There’s even another one of those thin black blankets from before draped over the foot of the bed. It wouldn’t hurt to sleep, right? Just a little. 

Or a lot.

Just until he wakes up.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm only recently figuring out how timezones work, but honestly for something like this it doesn't seem to matter so much. But for my fics in bigger fandoms where new uploads can drown in a wave of other fics, i'm trying to master the perfect time where my thing will reach the most viewers but it never works. idk
> 
> also hi whats up this one's a lot longer than the other one. loVe yOu.

He’s woken up by a voice, THE voice, spouting a greeting of an incongruously cheerful caliber. “Good morning, lovely citizens! Please be awake and attentive when one of our White Shadows come to fetch you!”   
  
Ryan screws his eyes shut tight, despite the fact that he’s very much awake and absolutely not going back to sleep. It’s a futile effort to hold onto the tendrils of darkness for long, because his eyes force themselves open after a while, responding involuntarily to the ever-harsh artificial light.

A girl. The girl, _his_ girl. Right there next to him. Smiling, tilting, laughing, pink, good, why are you here why are you here HOW are you-

  
  
Ryan jumps back and nearly falls off of the cot, blinking rapidly. Pressed up against the glass was the girl he saw before, inquisitive and watching. She was right next to his face, presumably watching him sleep.

And she looked like Tessa. Another pang of anguish runs through Ryan’s veins. She looked  _ exactly _ like Tessa. He has to stand there, blinking dumbly, for a full minute or so before his head clears enough to process the world around him.

  
The girl raises her eyebrows. Now that he’s standing and looking down at her, he registers she doesn’t look like Tessa at all. Her hair is straight and brown, nose upturned and small, eyes a deep grey that nearly looks silver. She looks nothing like his girlfriend. He shakes his head again.

“What the hell?” He says, just above a whisper. She obviously can’t hear him, but she waves cheerfully all the same. 

Ryan half-waves back, because it would be awkward if he didn't. 

She grins, scooting away from the cot and to a clear expanse of glass, patting the floor next to her as if asking him to sit near her. He hesitantly approaches, sitting cross legged across from her as if he were trying to mimic her reflection. 

‘What’s your name?’ She mouths over exaggeratedly. Ryan just shows her his wrist.

She shakes her head and repeats the question.

Ryan rolls his eyes. Is this just going to be a female Dallon? Trying to convince him he’s magical and special?

  
  
He points to the R on his wrist. She nods. He traces the Y on the glass. She nods. A. N. 

‘Ryan.’ She mouths as a confirmation. ‘My name is-'

  
  
She tries to tell him her name but he doesn’t understand. She rolls her eyes. She painstakingly traces every letter on the glass between them. 

  
B. R. E. E. Z. Y.

Breezy. Ryan cocks his head, unsure if he’d read it right. “Breezy.” He says out loud and then waves his fingers and hands to imitate wind. She laughs, nods.

She mouths something, a question, a word. When he looks blankly at her, she spells “Magic?” on the glass between them. 

Ryan shakes his head and his hands in a minimizing gesture. “No. No.”

  
  
She taps the glass to get his attention, and then smiles. 

  
  
That racing confusion comes back in full blast because now her hair is pink and her eyes are black and sunken but so warm and-

Ryan kicks at the glass to get it to stop, and the fuzzy semblance of his love fades again. Breezy looks proud of herself, excited, as if she'd taught him something new and exciting. 

  
But she didn't, and she thinks that pretending to be someone left behind is fine and good. They're all full of themselves, Ryan thinks, all of them. Unless he's proven otherwise. 

“Magic.” She says again, agonizingly smug. 

“You’re just as bad as him.” Ryan mutters, turning away to face the opposite wall, irrationally upset. She clearly has a sort of light illusion magic too. Deceptive bastards .

His brain, against Ryan’s own will, retraces the illustration of Dallon in his mind. He was almost haunting, in his state of being half-dead, but Ryan can’t stop thinking about him. He wants to give him 3 meals a day and pretty clothes and make him into a model. 

Ugh.

Years could have passed then, and Ryan wouldn’t have really noticed. He stared at himself in the mirrored wall, finding his reflection fascinating. It can’t have been long since he was taken into this alternate reality, but his face already has that look of malnourishment, skin ugly and sunken, eyes unfocused and wild. He can nearly circle his ankle with his fingers. If the girl wasn’t there he would pull his shirt off and examine his ribs, but she is and he can feel her eyes on him constantly despite his effort to forget about her. His hair is stringy and every so often he cards his fingers through to see how it reacts. At home he’d wash his hair every morning. He hates the feeling of a dirty scalp more than anything.

He almost forgot that feeling until he could actually see what he looks like as the pangs in his stomach are more noticeable and uncomfortable. But now he can feel both at once and it’s indescribably frustrating. This is all so disgusting. He’s disgusting.

He’s zoned out by looking in his own eyes when the door opens, the so-called White Shadow comes at him without warning, grabbing one of his arms and wrenching him to his feet. 

“Jesus Christ, I could have gotten up on my own.”   
  


The same arm is twisted behind his back painfully and Ryan anticipates being blinded before stepping out of the room. But miraculously, he isn’t. They step into a sterile hallway, the Whiteness of his captor blending in almost seamlessly. Maybe that’s why.

  
He’s never really gotten that good of a look at them. They appear to be very large unarmed men in snow-colored spandex, the likeness of a skull a stand in for a human face. 

But they’re strong, and scary. Ryan has no defenses, not really, against anything they would try to do to him. 

  
He’s lead to another room, and is shocked to see equally frightened people gathered around a round table. There’s 9, he counts quickly, but there are three more chairs open, including Ryan’s own.    
  


The shadow pulls out the chair for him and pushes him down by the shoulder. He sits obediently, inching his chair forward so he’s closer to the table. The shadow retreats, and Ryan notices that there’s one for each person, lined up against the wall around 12 feet away from the table. The table itself is in the center of the room, draped in a black table cloth. Some people’s hands are cuffed over the table or to their chairs, and one of them is literally muzzled. No one’s talking. 

The door behind them opens again, and a White Shadow leads in Breezy. Ryan grunts. Breezy sits delicately beside him, waving slightly as she sits down. Ryan ignores her.

One more chair to fill.    


  
A woman’s long fingernails tap against the surface of the table, creating a rhythm in the silence. Ryan is sort of grateful for it. It’s like a ticking of a clock, a reassurance that time is indeed passing.

It feels like forever, but it isn’t, before the door opens again. And Ryan nearly flinches at the sight of the last prisoner.

  
  
Dallon, clothes bloody and looking significantly beat up, is being led to the table with that blindfold thing secured over his eyes and his hands cuffed in front of himself. He’s seated next to Breezy and the tenseness in his shoulders is evidence that he’d tried to fight when Ryan wasn’t there to tell him otherwise. 

Ryan examines him. The cut looks infected, stitched up but torn open since. Ryan feels bad about that despite his better judgement. Something about Ryan made Dallon think he could cut himself and that Ryan could fix it somehow, so it’s sort of indirectly his fault. 

Ryan kind of wants Dallon to know he’s here with him. Without thinking too hard about it, he maneuvers his toes around Breezy’s crossed legs to tap his foot like Dallon had to him when Ryan’s name was first called. Dallon’s spine straightens, and his head snaps eerily right to where Ryan is sitting. He swallows uncomfortably. People observe but still do not speak. 

“Welcome to our Dinner Theater, the ultimate display of your talents!” Says the voice the moment Dallon starts to turn away, “This is your chance to prove your usefulness. When you are called, display your ability. In the meantime?”   


  
A door opens, A woman wearing a plague doctor-esque mask pushes a cart with platters of food on it. Ryan absolutely salivates. Each person receives a platter of food, well, it smells like food, but it doesn’t exactly  _ look  _ like food. Just blobs, solids inside gelatin, steaming hot. It should be disgusting, but Ryan barely cares. He scoops a bit of the least threatening blob into his mouth. It tastes almost like chicken and gravy, almost like thanksgiving, and that’s enough. He shovels it all into his mouth without much thought as the woman retreats.

“This is the time you get to show off, so don’t waste it. Be unique, show all of your power, so we can figure out where you’re best situated.”

  
  
“Let us go.” The long nailed woman exclaims. “That’s where we’re best situated.”

  
  
Her shadow steps forward in a vaguely threatening way. She raises her hands up in surrender.

  
  
“Alright. Alright.”

  
  
“Up first, S265!”

  
  
A weaselly looking man stands, rubbing his hands up and down his pant legs, and Ryan barely looks up from his plate. 

“Um.” He says as Ryan samples an orange blob. Carroty. “I- I don’t know what’s happening, really. Um. Someone said something about magic? I’m not...magic.”

  
  
Ryan snorts into his carrot jello, feeling a certain sense of amused kinship with the man.

“But- I am a sound technician. I’m good with-- electrical stuff. If that’s something you’d need? I don’t know. I don’t- I just-”

  
  
“Time is up!”

  
  
The man sits back down gratefully. Ryan glances back at Dallon after a few more seconds of gorging, and a pang of something shoots through his chest when he sees Breezy leaning towards him, guiding his fork from the plate to his mouth. Ryan looks away, suddenly sick.

“Next, N297!"

  
  
The long nailed woman stands, hooded eyes surveying the others seated around the table. Her shoulders are tense and her long black hair flows down her back like a river. 

“Hi.” She says shortly, waving. “My name is Natasha. I don’t know if we’re supposed to do names and shit but whatever. I can manipulate shadows.”

  
  
She twirls her finger and her shadow, cast by the strange spotlights lining the ceiling, wiggles out of the confines of her silhouette and up the wall, obscuring the lights that cast it in the first place. The room is shrouded in darkness before anyone can blink.

  
  
And then she snaps and the darkness dispels. 

  
  
“Um, yeah.” She says before she sits down. The voice doesn’t interject...apparently that’s adequate enough.

Ryan fully sets his fork down now, the aftertaste of the gelatin tasting like metal or blood in his mouth. This isn’t right.

“Next, A208!”

  
  
The muzzled straight-jacketed (young young) girl is helped up by her elbows. She lets out a guttural screech, trying to fight them but they don’t budge. Simply, in one movement, they remove the muzzle and she absolutely  _ screams _ , jets of flames spewing in every direction. Ryan ducks just in time to avoid a scorching pillar of light, but it catches the edge of Breezy’s hair, and it goes up in flames like dry straw. Ryan throws his water at her in panic and the flames nearly sizzle out. He pats the ends of her hair a few times as insurance, and she’s breathing hard and he just kind of rests his hands on her arm to ground her. He’s shaken but not as much as she is. Her hair is only mildly singed but Ryan could see the wild panic in her eyes when she’d lit ablaze. 

  
They remuzzle the fire woman promptly after that. 

“Very good, Time’s up!”

  
  
A pang of hunger lurches through Ryan again and he reluctantly raises more slop up to his mouth. 

“Next up, B103!” 

Breezy stands up, shaking visibly and stroking the part of her hair that’s been burnt at the edges. “Hi. I- uh. I can dazzle you, if you want. By that I mean that I’ll assume the form of someone you trust in order to-- get you to do what I want. I don’t use it against anyone ever but- yeah.”

She sounds a lot more timid than Ryan imagined her voice to be, but that might just be because of the fire. She demonstrates by morphing into what is an objectively attractive woman(even if she was one in the first place), and a few people clap appreciatively. She bows slightly before she sits back down. 

Next up was a self proclaimed necromancer, which is not Ryan’s cup of tea, especially when the same woman who had brought them their food procured a dead rat for the guy to show off with. When he was done (watching it get up like it was just napping was truly eerie), it climbed up onto the young man’s shoulder and stayed there. 

The next man that came up didn’t have any ability, neither did the next woman. With everyone who gets called up, Ryan gets more and more anxious. He won’t have anything to show. 

  
  
And he’s also afraid that Dallon will attempt to fight or start a revolution or something. Even though Ryan hasn’t known him for that long he feels like that’s something he would do.

One man claimed to be an alchemist, but he wasn’t given any materials. He sits down awkwardly. 

Another woman had the ability to charm animals, and stole the necromancer’s rat. 

One boy refused to stand or speak, even when the shadows dragged him up and made him stand there for a horrible one and a half minutes.

  
Now it’s down to Dallon and Ryan and Ryan’s heartbeat is caught in his throat and behind his eyelids and in his ears.

  
  
“D308, your turn!”

  
  
Dallon starts, as if he were drifting asleep and was woken up. Two shadows grab his shoulders and heft him t o his feet, and then drag him to a more ideal position. 

“Can you uncuff me, at least?”

  
  
They do. Dallon, still effectively blind, flexes his fingers and straightens up. “Hi everyone and Ryan.”

  
  
Breezy looks at him oddly, and Ryan blushes, halfway to coughing. 

“My name is Dallon, I’m a light wielder.”

Ryan expects a flash similar to the one he’d shown him before, but instead he does a series of intricate weaving patterns with his fingers and suddenly at his fingertips are little fairies, and they spread out through the room, skating in air, until they hit a wall and disperse into sparks that fall and die. 

“But I can also see the future.” He says grimly, “All I can say is watch your back. Don’t let your guard down.”

  
  
The shadows recuff him and attempt to make him sit back down but he resists like the stupid idiot he is. While this is happening, Ryan’s called to the front of the room and Dallon perks up as if that was the confirmation he needed. He elbows one of his captors in the throat. 

“I um-” Everyone’s distracted by the show that Dallon’s putting on, but Ryan wants to get this done with as quick as he can. “I am not magical, I can’t do anything, but I’m a computer technician so-”

  
  
“He’s lying!” Dallon calls out. “He’s a healer. He’s a healer. Let him show you.”

  
  
“Dallon, no.” Ryan hisses through his teeth. “I’m not you  _ know  _ that I’m not-”   


  
“Let him heal the cut on my arm. Let him show you.”

  
  
“Oh my  _ god _ -”

  
  
To both of their surprises, they comply, bringing Dallon over to Ryan. When he gets close Ryan asks “What are you  _ doing? _ ” through clenched teeth. He’s halfway to a panic attack, and Ryan  _ never _ panics.

“I believe in you.” He says, sticking his mutilated arm under Ryan’s eyeline for the second time. It looks worse now, all ripped skin and stitches. At least it isn’t actively bleeding.

“I-” Ryan inhales. He must be crazy. He must be completely fucking insane.”Okay.”

  
  
He encloses the wound in his bare hands, closing his eyes. For a while, nothing happens. Everything's silent, everyone's watching, and nothing's happening. It's dreadful. It feels like he'd just stepped on stage and choked, forgot the beat, forgot the song. He's about to cry, or pull away and give up, but-

"Hey. It's okay." Dallon whispers under his breath, "Breathe, concentrate, visualize. That's all you've got to do."

 _That's easy for you to say!_ Ryan screams inwardly, but after a few moments, he forces himself to steady his breaths. Visualize. Visualize what?  
  
Foolishly, he thinks of a ziplock bag, slowly sealing it between his fingers and-

His fingers start tingling and he almost lets go of Dallon's arm in shock. The feeling ceases as soon as it starts, and _no that can't happen you have to do this you have to KNOW if this is real or not_. 

  
The feeling comes back, Ryan can feel the crease in his brow from concentration, but he can't hear anything, can't feel anything else from the buzzing that is traveling from his fingers to his forearms, up to his chest, his heart. His pulse increases, blood rushes to his head and makes it pound. He doesn't let it go. 

"Ryan, oh my god-"

  
  
His head starts to throb, so suddenly and violently that he clenches his teeth to try and prevent himself from crying out. _Fuck. Fuck. Fuck._

  
"It's okay, you're almost there. Oh my god, don't stop, you're doing it!"  
  


Ryan can only grunt in response to shut him up. The pain climbs until his vision leaves him completely. He feels like he’s leaving his body. He’s had migraines before and this is  _ worse. _ He’s going to die, he’s about to-

“Ryan, look.” 

  
  
He’s being torn away from Dallon, two strong hands on his shoulders dragging him back and catching him when he falls. Dallon is waving his arm in the air and somebody’s clapping but Ryan’s just so confused and in pain. 

  
  
“You did it!” He yells, and Ryan passes out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> love ya'll. If you made it this far, kudos or comment to let me know you exist


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yo yo yo 
> 
> Enjoy this chapter or else :))
> 
> ALso comment and kudos please, it's what encourages me to keep writing lols

Ryan wakes up in someone’s arms. 

This keeps happening, his life segmented into chapters by passing out and coming to, always waking slightly more confused than the last time it’d happened. 

But right now, he’s being held, and even though he’s confused, he  _ knows _ that he isn’t home. His head still hurts from that stunt he pulled with Dallon before, the buzz of fluorescents are still overbearing, the body pressed against him isn’t familiar, and he’s lying on something hard and cold. His head hurts when he attempts to crack his eyes open, so he plasters them shut again. 

  
  
The person’s arm wraps around Ryan more securely when he tries to stir and his heartbeat stutters in his chest. His elbow jerks back in a sort of fight response and catches the person in their ribs. They retract their grip and groan halfheartedly. Ryan scrambles back as far as he can the moment he's relinquished, quite literally blind, and justifiably freaked out.

  
  
“What the hell?” Raspy from sleep, Dallon’s voice travels like dandelion seeds floating through the air. Ryan is immediately irritated. Of course it's him. It's always him.

  
“What the hell is right! What the  _ hell  _ are you doing?”

“You were cold.” Dallon says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Ryan shakes his head, deciding not to dwell on it.

  
  
“Yeah, okay, cool, where  _ are _ we?”

  
  
“You could open your eyes and see--”Dallon drawls, and Ryan can hear the smirk infused into the words. 

  
  
“Every time I try to open my eyes my head figuratively attempts to tear itself in half, Dallon! Stop being coy, and  _ tell _ me.”   
  


“Are you- alright?” Concern inches into Dallon's tone and Ryan doesn't have the patience.

  
  
“NO!” Ryan screeches, and to his horror, he feels tears springing to his eyes. He paws at them viciously. “Stop acting like this is a fucking  _ game _ you want to  _ win! _ It’s  _ not  _ a game, it’s our actual lives! You’re so--!”

  
  
“This probably isn’t helping the headache.” Dallon replies with a certain air of authority, and not for the first time, Ryan thinks that he might just be a gigantic jerk that’s planted with him to make him think he’s going  _ insane _ . “Lie back down.”

  
  
“No.” Ryan says petulantly, standing som ewhere undetermined with his eyes closed. He feels very vulnerable, and he can tell Dallon is staring at him in that  _ way; _ oddly intense and captivating. He’s glad he can’t see it.

  
  
“Okay.” He says, with the air of placating a child. “Do you want to sit? I can get you some water.”

  
  
Ryan does. But he doesn’t want to tell him that. And his throat is absolutely parched. 

He hears Dallon get up from the floor, and then feels one of his hands on the crease of his elbow. He allows Dallon to lead him to an elevated surface that he sits down on. He then turns him and taps his spine. “You can lean against the wall.” 

  
  
Ryan does, pulling his knees up to his chest and resting his forehead on them in hopes that it quells the battering of his brain. 

Dallon leaves, opens a door (bathroom?). Ryan’s suspicions are confirmed when he hears water running. Dallon pads back and stuffs a dixie cup into his hand.

Ryan gulps it in one go, gratefully. He’d thrown his water on Breezy before so he’d barely had time to hydrate. 

“Thank you.”   


  
“Want more?”

  
  
Ryan nods, and Dallon brings two dixie cups back this time. Dallon has to make 5 trips before Ryan feels any better.

“Thank you.” Ryan says again, and he pretends he isn’t startled when Dallon gently pats his shoulder. 

  
  
“Always.”

  
  
Ryan’s curiosity is at it’s bursting point, held back only by a thin membrane of restraint, left over from his real-world manners. Why. Why him?

  
  
I mean, he knows about the creepy future dream, but past that he  _ has _ to see how utterly unlike him Ryan is. They aren’t compatible at all as friends, or like  _ anything _ .

_ Liar _ .  His brain supplies, and Ryan wants to punch the glass beside him. He’s decided that he’s back in one of those creepy glass tanks again. Strangely, this time with a companion. They’re mice in a showcase, rats in a lab, huddling for warmth and all. 

He feels Dallon lean up against the thing he’s on (the cot, most likely) head near Ryan’s socked feet. 

  
  
“I was worried about you.” He says finally. “You’ve been sleeping for a while.”

  
  
“So the best course of action was to of course, spoon me.” Ryan mumbles grumpily. “Thanks.”

  
  
“You were cold, Ryan.” And he sounds annoyed now. “I’m sorry if I bruised your masculinity-”

  
  
“That isn’t- you’re  _ impossible _ -”

  
  
“You’re impossible.” Dallons snaps back, but it holds no bite. Ryan starts to inch open his eyes, the pain still overbearing, but slightly less so. He is indeed back in one of the glass tanks, on the cot on the right. The door to the bathroom is left ajar, and there’s a litter of dixie cups at his feet. He leans over to collect them, just in case they’re not given any more. 

Dallon looks up to watch him, eyes sunken and tired and worried. He prefers puppy dog Dallon, but he won’t say so. He just regards his companion coldly and stacks the cups in silence. 

“So I guess you’re gonna have to tell me what made you upset so I don’t do it again.” Dallon says in earnest, turning and grasping the edge of the cot. “I’m sorry.”

  
  
“I-- you--” Ryan wants to strangle him but he has no reason why that he can articulate to his irritating companion. “You don’t have to be sorry.”

  
  
“You’re clearly upset-”

  
  
“Yeah, but- that doesn’t automatically mean I’m upset at  _ you _ -”

  
  
“You were yelling at me-”

  
  
“Well- yeah, but-”

  
  
“Like specifically at me-”

  
  
“Ugh!!”

  
  
“See?” Dallon once again looks a certain brand of smug. Ryan wants to slap him.

  
  
“You wanna know why I’m upset?! Shit like that! Goddamnit Dallon.” Ryan clutches at the roots of his hair and pulls hard, inciting pain to distract him from his already existing pain. It works only as a placebo effect, but he still feels a bit better. “Don’t-- mess with me to get a reaction it’s- not very nice.”

“Ok, I will try.” Dallon sighs, rubbing his forearm absently. “I- I want you to be happy, to feel as comfortable and safe as possible.”

  
  
The sincerity of his words nearly knocks Ryan down. He needs to change the subject. Now.

“Did I hallucinate healing your arm or did I actually do that?"

  
  
Dallon’s glumness falls away like a curtain and he leaps up, shoving his arm into view. “Ryan you did it!! I was so proud of you!”

Ryan smiles despite himself, putting aside what it obviously took out of him. “You were right, I guess. I have magic shit in my blood.”

  
  
“I’m always right.” Dallon says pridefully, allowing Ryan to trace the minimal scar left behind from the wound. 

“Maybe.” Ryan says vaguely. He doubts it, but if it makes Dallon stop...fussing, then so be it. Where the rip in his skin was before he’d passed out, is replaced by a faint white line. Ryan still doesn’t completely believe that he could’ve done that his whole life if he’d tried hard enough. 

Maybe weirdness was cooked into those horrible health bars.

Speaking of.    


Ryan's stomach growls loudly. Dallon looks sympathetic. 

“They haven’t come around with anything for hours.” He says, already turning and crawling to what appears to be a little nest made up of two blankets, where they were curled up together before, “But I saved half of my bar for you.”

  
  
Ryan groans, closing his eyes against the lights again, trying to force down the relentless ailment of hunger. “Dude, you need to eat too.”

  
  
“I’m used to it.” Dallon says, grabbing the crumpled paper packaging that is now synonymous with ‘food’ in Ryan’s mind. It’s folded in half, covering the unscathed half of the bar. Ryan snatches it from Dallon’s outstretched hand, despite his mind screaming to ‘let him eat it, he obviously needs it’. 

He shoves it into his mouth. He’s an animal, a savage, and it’s all fine.

After chewing and swallowing entirely too fast, he gets out, “What do you mean you’re used to it?”

  
  
Dallon shrugs defensively, playing with sparkles, juggling little pellets of glow between his fingers. “I dunno. It doesn’t matter.”   
  


“Um.” Ryan wants to ask, so bad, it feels like an itch. “Okay, if you say so.”

  
  
He’s stuck in here with this man for god knows how long, he shouldn’t make him mad. 

“Well hopefully they’ll give us more food soon.” Ryan says, pinching his forearm, “I’ll go into shock.”

  
  
“I’ll try and get them to give us more than just one next time. They don’t like to feed the sleeping.”   


  
“Or maybe they think we’re dead.”

Dallon looks at him, nods slowly. “Yeah.”

  
  
Ryan draws himself up, bewildered. “I was kidding.”

  
  
“I don’t- anything is possible with them.”

  
  
Ryan scoots forward, suddenly and intensely curious. “What are they? Do you know what they are?”

Dallon shakes his head. “No, but I don’t think that they’re human.”   
  


“Oh.”

  
They don’t look _i_ _ n-human _ , but they don’t necessarily look like normal people either. For one thing, they’re insanely tall. Taller than Dallon's towering height by at least a head. Their shoulders are entirely too broad, and when Ryan had felt their hand on his shoulder there was no warmth, only a presence, neutral and strange. They all have the same build, same height, same way of walking. It’s strange, but Ryan hasn’t dwelled on it too much. There was too much else to think about. 

“...are we human?” Ryan asks quietly after a few minutes of sustained silence. “Or are we something else?”

  
  
Dallon straightens, his spine curling out of it’s slump and raising his body to sit elegantly like a prince. The white light highlights his cheekbones, echoes the shine in his eyes, brightens his dirty hair. He turns, and Ryan is mesmerized by him when his small mouth turns up into a crooked smile. Instead of flinching, Ryan leans into the touch when Dallon’s smooth fingers caress his face. 

  
“Oh Ryan, we are so much better.”   


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to everyone who's read and enjoyed. :)))!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why am I writing a whole ass novel!?!?! 
> 
> Also i love you guys thanks for reading and commenting. like legit i thought i was going to delete this but now i can't cause people are reading hehe. 
> 
> Thanks for your support!!

Dallon does this really weird thing, well, everything he does is weird, but weirder than usual. When he wakes up, there’s no transition between totally asleep and totally awake. It’s like someone had flipped an on switch. The first time he’d been woken by Dallon abruptly unwrapping himself from Ryan’s torso it had been so sudden that he’d jumped and accidentally slammed his head back down onto the floor. Dallon laughed at him.

But that’s not the weirdest thing. See, Immediately after he wakes up, he stands and walks to the adjacent corner and sits, facing the wall. Ryan is usually woken by this, so he watches him go in puzzlement.

  
Without fail, every self-determined ‘morning’ (sometimes they get news over the speakers but it’s very rarely pertaining to them), Dallon sits cross-legged in the same corner, resting his forehead where the walls join. And then he sits there for  _ hours _ , unmoving. When Ryan went over to check on him, he realized that Dallon wasn’t blinking either. 

Creepy shit. 

“Oh.” He says, when Ryan finally found the nerve to ask him _why_ , “I’m just trying to figure out what happens next.”

“Can you see the infinite possibilities of the universe in the dust between the walls?”

“I just need a blank canvas, to paint the future on.” Dallon says, closing his eyes, facing him now. “What do you want to see, tomorrow? Three days from now? They all look painfully the same.”

He raises his arm like a conductor readying an orchestra, “Oh, so you decide to sleep on the cot tomorrow, an interesting choice.” Dallon gestures blindly to exactly where the cot is. 

“And I sit in a different corner because-”

  
  
“I was just going to point that out-” Ryan jumps in, not completely following what’s going on, “What do you have against the other corners?”

  
  
Dallon giggles, opening his eyes to smile at him. “So of course, I switch corners to make you happy.”

  
  
“It wasn’t upsetting, per say-” Ryan mutters grumpily, standing up and brushing off imaginary dirt from his pants. There’s a pair next to them now, intertwined under a blanket, who both peer over at Ryan and Dallon curiously, but look away when either of them make eye contact. 

He can see a fair amount of rooms down the line, like nesting dolls, a long tunnel. They almost seem to be alternate universes, different versions of them. He knows they aren’t. He knows they’re individuals, but all Ryan can see are shells of what used to be people.

  
When Ryan looks at himself in the mirrored wall, that’s all he can see too. A shell. He’d tried to wash his hair in the bathroom sink, but the water is freezing and most times it just isn’t worth it.

Periodically a new pair will be placed in a room, one, two, three, four tanks down, and it’s probably the only entertainment Ryan has except for when Dallon starts acting weird or doing stuff with his magic. 

  
He said “It’s dangerous to do anything big in here, if something went wrong you and I could get impaled or overwhelmed with light and die.” when Ryan asked if they could try to break out. 

So he’s somewhat resigned to this. It isn’t the worst thing in the world. It’s definitely been worse. They’ve been bringing them more health bars at Dallon’s request(don’t ask Ryan why they listen to him, he couldn’t tell you), but nothing other than that. They’re still starving but slightly less so. 

And...even though Ryan wouldn’t admit it out loud, he likes Dallon. He likes talking to him and spending time with him. He makes him laugh and smile despite everything that’s going on. He wouldn’t want to be stuck here with anyone else he has ever met. 

And that kind of scares him.

“Hey-”

  
  
Oh wow hi- Ryan takes a few steps back. While lost in thought, Dallon decided to sneak up on him, tapping his nose with his middle finger in greeting(?!?!?!).

“You were staring into space.” Dallon says, squeezing his shoulder and moving past him to the bathroom, “Kinda creepy.”

  
  
“Oh, that’s rich coming from you!” Ryan calls back to him, and Dallon sniggers, closing the door behind him. 

He wonders when something’s going to happen to them. He knows Dallon is nervous. He’s spending more and more time in the ‘future’, trying to figure it out. So far nothing’s come up. It’s like he’s losing him a little, to a time that isn’t theirs yet. 

Not that he could ever proclaim him to be in any sense of the word _his_ , in order to lose him. Not that he’s even come close to understanding the man in the slightest. If someone asked (ha) he wouldn’t admit to them the extent that he’s tried to. Oh god, how he’s tried. Maybe his problem is that Dallon simply isn’t one to be understood in the first place. 

He’s the definition of an enigma, a siren who enchants without even needing to sing. Not like Breezy’s deception, not really. This is just him.    


  
Or maybe it’s something wrong with Ryan, or something magnetic about the both of them. Or maybe his song is the inaudible sort, the kind that isn’t a song at all. 

If this seems pointless, all this poetic introspection, it’s because it is. If they had met through mutual friends at a bar or something in real life, Ryan likely wouldn’t have given him a second thought, but  _ here _ ? Dallon is all he has. This crazy, incredible person is all that he has to keep himself sane. He can think of home, but that feels like another life, or a nice and long dream that he’d just woken up from.Hunger, glass, light, pain, that’s what’s real. Grass and sun and pretty girls that kiss you in the morning are just figments of the mind. 

Dallon lets the bathroom door slam open loudly, stretching like a cat. Ryan catches himself staring at the strip of pale skin that peeks out from under Dallon's shirt when he raises one of his arms above his head, blushes, and ducks his head to play with the hem of his own shirt when Dallon’s eyes find his. He decides to ignore that he just did that.    


  
“Pretty cramped in there.” Dallon grumbles, a dixie cup in his hand. He downs it quickly, so he back tracks and fills it up again. “Hey, I cut my cheek, could you maybe heal it?”

  
  
“ _ How?” _ Ryan notices the thin line of red the moment he says the words, “Dude-”

“I tried shaving.” Dallon shrugs, “It worked. I  _ always _ cut myself shaving, so don’t lecture me.”

  
  
Ryan splutters, offended. “I don’t  _ lecture _ \- when have I lectured you?”

Dallon laughs (it’s a low amused sound that Ryan has come to enjoy), shrugging. 

“You didn’t need to shave anyway, you barely even grow stubble.” Ryan rubs at his own face, ragged with facial hair, “Ugh, now that you’ve pointed it out I feel disgusting.”

  
  
“Oh shut up! I do! And you look fine.” He plops onto the ground, cross legged. Ryan follows him down, and Dallon scoots forward so their knees touch. Ryan stares at the points of contact. “I can try to shave you if you want.”

Ryan’s head snaps up as Dallon whips out a scary looking blade of light with a flick of his finger. Ryan shakes his head rapidly, waving it away. 

  
  
“Nonono-- you’ll fillet my nose or something.” Ryan says (not, no definitely not) fondly, “I’ll pass for now.”

  
  
“Fine.” He leans so close that Ryan could count his eyelashes if he wanted, and Ryan’s face heats against his will, “Can you  _ please _ heal my face, Ry?”

“Don’t call me that.” Ryan scrunches up his nose, leans back on his palms, overplaying his consideration. 

No. He hasn’t tried healing anything since the inciting incident. It’s terrifying to him, the mere shadow of that pain he felt. He thought he was legitimately going to die. He hasn’t told Dallon this. Next to him he feels like a failure. God. Almost dying just to heal a scratch(it was more than a scratch,absolutely, but Ryan’s self esteem is plummeting deeper by the day) looks pathetic next to all of those people slinging around magic with ease. 

Dallon smiles, catching his eye. “Pleaaase?”   
  
Ryan leans forward before he even realizes he’s doing it, and his middle and his ring finger make contact with the cut on his cheek. Dallon closes his eyes. Ryan takes a moment to find that focus again, and for a split second it feels like he’s aware of every blood cell in his body, and he knows that it’s about to work. 

The telltale tingle starts at the point of contact, spreading up the pads of his fingers, and up through the palm of his hand shoot pins and needles, as if it’s fallen asleep. A few moments later, he draws his hand back and the cut is gone. 

  
  
Dallon rubs at the newly healed skin, smiling brightly. “You’re incredible.”

  
“It was barely a papercut.” Ryan waves it off but he’s secretly pleased with himself. His power didn’t fucking attempt to murder him this time, but that might just be proportional to the size of the wound.   


  
“But it’s  _ gone _ .” He says in awe, and before Ryan can blink he has an armful of Dallon. “Thank you.”

Ryan sucks in a breath, hesitantly wrapping his arms around Dallon's torso. It's nice.   
  


Dallon is a touchy feely type of person, Ryan knows that. It doesn’t stop him from jumping every time the taller man initiates contact. He’s gotten used to Dallon’s insistence to hold him at night, because he’s come to expect it, but awake ‘daytime’ Dallon likes to go from zero to one hundred at any given time. He’s all elbows and energy. It’s hard to get used to.

He pats Dallon’s back twice before pushing him off, ignoring the lack of feeling in his right hand. “Alright, get off. You’re welcome.”

The door opens then, and both of their heads snap over to it. A white shadow stands there, and Ryan is so hungry that he almost unconsciously pushes Dallon to the side to get to the food first. 

But it’s not holding any food.

Instead of fear comes an unsteady calm. Dallon grips his arm, an attempt to ground himself, presumably. 

In three long steps, the thing looms over them, grabs Ryan’s arm, pulls him up and away. Dallon grasps at Ryan’s feet but he’s already gone by the time he could get any leverage. 

  
  
“Ryan!” Dallon sounds genuinely distressed, and it makes Ryan’s heart hurt. 

  
  
Ryan twists to try and catch a glimpse of his companion, but he isn’t strong enough. “It’s okay, It’s alright. Don’t worry.”

Dallon makes a wounded noise. 

“It’s okay!” He manages to yelp before the door slams shut behind him. 

He doesn’t know which one of them he’s reassuring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hoo boy gamers, here we go again. 
> 
> And comment and kudos brochacho i'll know if you don't (kidding. love you)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah i totally know what im doing. ohyeah for sURE.
> 
> So this one is like...exposition i hope you like it :))))

He’s taken to a room with screens and panels and buttons on the walls, all dull and dark. His hand is still lacking any feeling, and his strange calm has fled farther with each twist and turn they took through the facility. He is forced to sit on a strappy chair, fastened into it more securely than he would be on a roller coaster ride, a tight strap on each limb. The shadow then retreats to stand at the door.

He's about to hyperventilate. His (not ever very well) suppressed claustrophobia is making it hard to breathe. Is this it? Are they going to torture him? Kill him?

_ No no don't think about that. What do you know? What can you control? _

Ok, here's what he knows. A. Dallon said that he saw him sleeping back in the tank tonight. Right, that doesn't mean that much, as the reliability of his predictions isn’t exactly a constant. B. They want something from him, he knows that. If not, why the hell would they be holding him here? Therefore, he has leverage in some form. C. 

There is no c.

Ryan’s breaths are uneven. He would slap himself if he could. Don’t show this goddamn weakness, it’ll just make everything worse. 

He’s left there to agonize for a few minutes, wishing that he had some of Dallon’s Slice and Dice magic instead of whatever the fuck he was landed with. These leather straps would be nothing against that. He flexes his wrists.

  
What’s with Dallon and his double powers, anyway?! He gets to see the future,  _ and _ throw around sparkly spears of death? All Ryan can do is nearly kill himself compensating for someone else’s stupidity. Where was this ability when he broke his arm?

Wait what if he can only heal other people? What’s the use of being able to heal on will without being able to heal  _ yourself? _

Ryan feels like he got the shallow end of the magic pool, and it’s frustrating to all hell. 

  
The door opens and Ryan is briefly confused that he wasn’t blinded this time, but then he sees why he wasn’t. 

“You’re an interesting one, Mr. Seaman.” The technically modulated voice comes from a woman in a surgical mask and dark-tinted glasses. Her hair is completely covered by a sort of habit-like hood that camouflages with her black dress. “Our experts have been trying to figure you out for a while.”   
  
“How long have we been here?” Ryan asks roughly, “How long is a while?”

“I’ll tell you if you aren’t difficult” She tsks, “I’ve heard your friend is quite the handful.” 

  
  
“He isn’t my friend.” Ryan says automatically, even though that’s hardly true anymore after the recent days/weeks they’d spent in solitude together. He just doesn’t really want these pieces of shit to exploit that relationship. 

The woman shrugs. “Doesn’t matter to me. Now,”

  
  
She draws out a chair, sits to be level with him. It doesn’t feel level at all. “You’re quite unique.”

  
  
“Yeah?” Ryan doesn’t remotely care. He doesn’t really want to know.

“You, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, are a healer. Am I correct in assuming that before you met Mr. Weekes, you were unaware of this?”

  
  
“Mr.-”

  
  
“Subject D308” She amends, a tinge of annoyance in what’s left of her voice. “Drink this.”   
  
She holds a cup of something to his lips, and he tries to close his mouth but she puts a thumb below his bottom lip, holding his mouth open enough to get some of the liquid in, then covering his mouth with her palm to prevent him spitting it out. He swallows against his better judgment, just to get the taste of it out of his mouth. It has the mouth-feel of a thick sauce, a taste nearly metallic like blood, while also somewhat fruity as if there was an attempt to mask it.

He nearly gags. The woman snaps her fingers and Ryan’s eyes focus forward. 

“Mr.Seaman, pay attention. Were you unaware of your ability before you came here?”

“Oh. Um. Yes. I didn’t- know.” Ryan regards his bound hands, clenching them into fists. “I almost don’t believe that-- it was me. I don’t know. Maybe it was a sick trick from  _ him _ .”

  
  
“Do you really think that Subject D308 has the capacity to do anything malicious towards you?” She asks, clicking a pen that she drew from an inner pocket of her cape/dress/hood. She hooks a rolling cart with her foot, pulling it toward her and grabbing a clipboard off of it. 

Ryan shakes his head lethargically. “Not really? I- I don’t know. He’s not always the best with like knowing what’s socially acceptable and stuff, not that it matters here or anything, why am I telling you this? I-”

  
  
Ryan forces his mouth closed. 

“We have been monitoring you two, you know that?”

  
  
“Duh.” Ryan says, rather childishly. 

“Nothing you’ve shared or ever will share between each other is truly private, you understand?”

  
  
A pulse of panic, of frustration, courses through him at the thought. He grits his teeth. “Yeah. I understand.”

  
  
“So you understand that whatever you say when we speak to you isn’t new information, so you might as well cooperate.”

  
  
“And you’ll tell me how long I’ve been here?”

  
  
She pauses a beat, and then nods. 

  
  
“Fine.” Ryan says, “I don’t know why you’re interrogating me, Dallon is more interesting.”   
  


Once again, Ryan did NOT mean to say that. He bites his tongue. What’s wrong with him?

  
  
“Oh, they didn’t want to see you to interrogate you, per se.” She waves her pen in a looping motion and crosses her legs. “But anything you say is preferred to be recorded. And truthful, please.”

  
  
Ryan doesn’t see the reasoning behind their reasoning. It’s gross and manipulative, but what else was he expecting from his captors? Why the hell should he do anything for them?

“Now,” She says again, regarding her clipboard as she jots down notes(on what?!?!), “Like I was saying before, you’re very different from most of our patients.”

  
  
“Patients!?” Ryan bursts, outraged “Is that what you call us?”

“What would you prefer?”

  
  
“Prisoners!” 

“Oh no, Mr. Seaman. We are only attempting to unlock your true potential, a potential that you said yourself you weren’t even aware of.”   
  


“I would have been absolutely fine with that-”

“It’s for the good of the world that you-”

  
  
“It seems like it’s for the good of your own agenda-”

  
  
“Enough, Mr. Seaman. Let me continue.”

  
  
“Oh.” Ryan says scathingly,” By all means.”

“Your blood has very interesting qualities, as all of our accepted patients do, but we have never quite seen anything like yours before. Most healers need conductors, like water or salves that they can enchant. In addition to their energy, that is how our healers have been using their restorative properties. There have been no healers quite like you.”

  
  
“Huh?”

  
  
“Your energy seems to speed up time...quicken the healing process of the human body.”

  
  
“At the expense of my own health.” Ryan fires back. “I suppose you like that, though.”

  
  
“No.” The woman says shortly, “No, you’re very useful, we don’t want you to die.”

  
  
“Oh.The starving and the putting me alone in a room with a death machine man kind of paints a different picture.”

Ryan needs to stop talking. Goddamnit. Fine, he thinks Dallon might snap and accidentally sever his head, but that doesn’t mean he should say that out loud. 

  
  
“Do you believe that Mr.Weekes has any intent to harm you?” She asks a slightly different variation of the same question and Ryan once again says no, confused at the lack of relevance.

“We agree.” She says, “And if you wish we can bring you more food once in a while.”

  
  
“Why don’t I believe you?”

  
  
“Over the next few days you should expect us to be withdrawing you to do tests. Our knowledge of people with qualities like you is little to none, and we wish to find out more. After sessions in which you drain too much energy we will nurse you back to a steady condition before placing you back with Mr.Weekes. Tell him that. He is at the moment, a danger to himself in your absence.”   


  
Ryan strains against his restraints. “God! Then stop him! Tell him I’m okay!”

  
  
“You aren’t friends?” She clarifies, clicking her pen. Ryan is, he thinks, justly outraged.

  
  
“It doesn't matter! I don't want him to hurt himself because of me. Don’t you guys have any  _ empathy _ ?”   
  


“I need to take more of your blood.” She deflects. “Stay still.”

  
  
“Oh,” Ryan bites, struggling to be as squirmy as possible. “Well, It’s not like I have a  _ choice _ .”

  
  
“This isn’t what I’d call cooperating, Mr.Seaman.” Tuts the woman as she stands. Ryan tracks her movements tiredly, his mind is quick and slow and uninhibited.

“This isn’t what I’d call humane-” Ryan can’t think of an insult. He must be really out of it because usually, that isn't very hard. “c-creepy lady!”

  
  
He tracks her movement until his neck can’t turn anymore. 

“Stay still.” She cautions again as she returns to swab the exposed skin in the crook of his elbow. She takes more blood. Ryan almost faints, his vision going completely black before alternating between darkness and minimal tunnel vision, but the will of his mind keeps his eyes and thoughts open and conscious. He won’t faint here, he won’t let himself be that vulnerable. To anyone, but especially these shitheads. 

  
  
_ But you let Dallon hold you while you sleep. _

_ Shut up, it’s not like you can stay awake all night it’s convenient.  _

_ There  _ **_is_ ** _ no night.  _

_   
_ _ Shut up. _

“-eaman. Mr. Seaman!”

  
  
“Huh?” Ryan’s vision and attention come back slowly, a little blurrily. 

  
  
“You almost passed out.” The woman says, and Ryan nearly passes out  _ again _ when he sees her sealing a container of his own blood. “I got enough for today.”

  
  
“Are you going to let me back?” Ryan asks shortly, all else forgotten, “Can I see him?”

She must have seen something in Ryan’s face because her tone softens the tiniest decibel.

  
  
“Yes, you’re going back. You really must calm him down, he attempted to break the cell, nearly killing himself. We subdued him.”

  
Ryan strains against his restraints again. “Is he-”

  
  
“He’s fine.” She says, writing something on the base of his neck with a sharpie. Ryan’s too freaked out to even ask. “See you soon, Mr. Seaman.”

  
  
The shadow reclaims him. The trip back to Dallon couldn’t be any longer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lovely lovely worldbuilding bamd
> 
> also side note why are they so cute?! Just in general.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there if you haven't yet check out my other story I just posted a few minutes ago 'On our way home' its pretty neat.
> 
> Thanks you guys, for reading, for commenting, you guys are just so amazing!!!!
> 
> Trigger warning: profanity

Ryan wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t necessarily a crying Dallon.

  
He’s thrust into the room without any ceremony and he trips on nothing and falls, still lightheaded. Dallon’s chained to the cot, both hands in cuffs that cover the entirety of his forearms. They’re warped as if he’d tried to burn them off, but failed. The keys are resting on the bed out of his reach. Ryan’s mind picks all of these things up in a split second and reads them back to him in the form of a list as he sits there, on all fours, panting. 

“Dallon?” Ryan asks, his small voice carrying through the room. He’s not good at this shit, he’s  _ never _ been good at this shit. One of the reasons that he’d been broken up with in the past was because he was so bad at comforting people when they’re sad. He sits back on his heels, afraid to reach out. 

  
  
His gaze caches on the people on either side of them looking in curiously. He flips one of them off, annoyed. They glare at him but look away. 

Dallon has his head buried in his arms, leaning against the end of the cot, his shoulders shaking in quiet sniffles. Ryan says his name again, and he looks up. 

“Ryan?”

  
  
“I’m okay, Dallon. I’m fine.” Ryan says, trying to be reassuring, but feeling as if he were talking to a dog and not a man. He adjusts his tone. “I promise, I’m okay. Are you?”

  
  
He shakes his head. “I saw you. I saw you getting hurt.”

  
  
“I didn’t, I wasn’t.” Ryan affirms, spreading his arms so Dallon can inspect him. “Look. I’m fine.”

Dallon does, and doesn’t show any signs of stopping or moving or talking so Ryan smiles grimly and grabs the keys off of the bed. Dallon watches with uneasy eyes as he inspects them, and then flinches when Ryan attempts to find out how to unlock them by grabbing his wrist. 

“What?!” Ryan demands, and Dallon looks down. Takes a breath, shakily huffs it out. 

“I burnt my hands, trying to get out.” He says this very fast, as if he was a child caught in a lie finally fessing up. 

  
  
A spike of annoyance runs through Ryan’s body because he’s _going to be expected to heal him_ ** _and he doesn’t know if_** ** _he can_** and it must have shown in his expression because Dallon looks even more upset. 

  
  
“I”m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry-” Dallon looks distant, gone again, eyes glazed over and brow creased. He mutters apologies like an incantation “I’m sorry-”

“Dallon, it’s okay!” Ryan is close to freaking out now, unsure how to handle this development. Crying people scare him. Panicking people  _ make him panic _ . “Please stop apologizing, please.” 

Dallon shakes his head, clamping his mouth shut. It looks forced. 

  
Ryan fumbles with the key in his anxiety, attempting to calm himself down by calming down his friend. “I’m going to uncuff you and then maybe we can try to fix your hands. Okay? I’m not mad.”

“I’m sorry. I was scared.”

  
  
“I can see.” Ryan says accidentally, agitated, trying to quell his shaking fingers before reaching out and grabbing his forearm. “ _ I’m _ sorry. Stay still for a second.”

Dallon nods. “Okay.”

  
  
Ryan finally locates the keyhole, turning the key slowly as to not jerk Dallon’s injuries around. The cuffs release and Ryan takes them off, letting them clatter down so Ryan can inspect Dallon’s wounds.

And  _ ouch _ . Dallon’s hands, wrists, and part of his arms are raw, lined with black electricity burns and open, cracking, blisters. They look so painful that Ryan cringes in empathy. 

“Oh, Dallon.” Ryan says, sitting back on his heels in a mixture of fear and amazement, “You’re so dangerous.”

Ryan’s words hang in the sterile air for a few moments and Dallon jerks his head from side to side, blinking viciously. Ryan watches Dallon’s eyes unfocus and then hone in on him. For a few seconds, he just stares. Ryan immediately feels bad for saying and thinking that one day Dallon will hurt him.

It’s obvious that he’ll hurt anyone who dares try. 

“They should keep me away from you.” Dallon says finally, the tone of his voice unnatural and sad and Ryan sighs. At least Dallon looks at home in his own eyes again, back in the present.

  
  
“I dunno man, I think it might be the opposite.” Ryan says, bracing himself internally for the pain that he’s about to feel. Stalling may seem cruel, but he can’t help it. “Every time you’ve gotten hurt has been because of me.”

“Only kind of.” Dallon says, “In the end it’s me that hurts me.”

  
Dallon is holding his hands out in front of him as if holding something invisible, but Ryan can tell that the pain is just stopping him from wanting to let them touch anything. 

Agh!! Ryan wants to cry. This isn’t fair. 

Ryan’s right hand is still buzzing, his head is light from the hunger and the blood they’ve just drawn. Ryan’s hurting, too.

  
  
But for some unknown reason, seeing this man in this much pain is agonizing in it’s own right.

  
  
“Alright then,” Ryan says, breathing in. “Okay.”

  
  
Dallon shivers, and then winces. 

“I’m going to try to help, but-” Ryan sucks a breath in. Fuck it. He needs to communicate with him. “I might pass out, or something. Like last time. I’m already kinda about to pass out and healing, um, using my magic kinda...hurts.”   
  


Dallon’s eyes widen. “Oh my god, really? I- I didn’t- How bad?”

  
  
“I thought I was going to die.” Ryan says truthfully. “Not with the little cut, but the big one really- I thought I was going to die.”

  
  
“Then please don’t- please-” Dallon snatches his hands away from him, wincing. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  
  
“Maybe I can just do a little at a time.” Ryan counter offers, “Maybe it’ll be easier and come with practice.”

  
  
Dallon looks doubtful. 

"No?"

Dallon scoots back. "My powers have never hurt me."

Ryan laughs incredulously, clenching his fists to pound the top of his knees in frustration. “Are you fucking kidding me?”   


  
“Oh my--” Now it’s Dallon’s turn to look annoyed. “I am aware of my capacity to hurt _anyone_ , and I’m not an exception. But it doesn’t hurt to _use_ them!”

  
  
“Just let me try, you won’t be able to sleep like this. Without sleep you can’t heal.”

  
  
Dallon has an entire battle with himself in his head that shows on his face, before sighing and offering his hands. “If you don’t stop when you feel bad I’ll kill you.”

  
  
“Sounds counterproductive.” Ryan takes Dallon’s right hand in both of his, the top hand only hovering above the bloody pink skin. His hand is still buzzing from before. It’s not quite pain yet, but he’s confident that in a few seconds it will be. 

“This is going to hurt, Dallon.” Ryan says, trying to prepare the both of them. “It’s going to hurt a lot.”

Dallon nods, deadset.

Ryan gathers his focus, stills his mind, his body, his heart. Okay. He presses his palm to Dallon’s, where the worst of the injury on that hand is. 

“ _ Fuck _ ” Dallon hisses, clenching his teeth and flexing his ankle in a desperate attempt to deal with the pain “Fuck, fuck-”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Ryan says faintly, his vision already threatening to leave him at the edges. The pain rushes through his veins and up his arm in 3 heartbeats. 

Dallon kicks out against the wall. One, two, three-

‘FUCK!” He yells again, four five- the lights go down to dim and then his vision turns black and he has to let go, he has to let go why is it so hard to let go?

  
  
He throws himself back, leaving Dallon sitting a few feet ahead of him with streaming eyes. 

His vision comes back slowly but there’s acute pain up both arms and in his chest, stabbing him, _devouring him_ from the inside out. 

Dallon breathes in, out, in- “Are you okay?”

  
  
“Y-yeah.” Ryan says, sitting up and sliding back over to him. “Did it help?” 

  
  
Dallon looks down on his hand. Over what used to be raw festering blisters are smooth expanses of pink smooth-shiny skin. It isn’t perfect, but-

“It isn’t that bad,” He says, flexing his fingers. “ It still hurts a lot, but- it’s twenty times better than it was before.”

He brings his palm to the glass floor, probably reveling in it’s coolness. 

“I should be okay.”

  
  
“Lemme try the other one.” Ryan says, nearly slurring. “ I want you to be  _ more _ okay.”

“I want you to not die, please” Dallon says, his ‘good hand’ stretched out now, as if to catch him if he fell forward. He will  _ not,  _ thank you! Ryan grabs Dallon’s damaged wrist and Dallon flinches, eyes pleading. “Ryan- lets rest.”

  
  
“Your hand.” Ryan mumbles, somewhat gone. His vision goes out again and this time he stumbles forward, catching himself before falling completely. Dallon sucks in a breath, using his slightly less damaged hand to grab Ryan’s forearm. 

  
  
“Here, like this.” Dallon says softly, guiding him to turn around. “I’ll lean against the wall and hold you. That way I won’t have to worry about accidentally hurting myself.”   
  
“Ha.” Ryan says, and then accidentally- “I’m so useless.”

“No, you’re amazing.” He says, again. Ryan will never believe him. “Lean back on me.”

Ryan rolls his eyes, but allows Dallon to pull him between his legs and flush to his chest. They’re propped up between the wall and the cot. Ryan thinks this must be very uncomfortable for Dallon. Though Ryan is smaller than Dallon he isn’t  _ small _ . Well. Maybe now he is. When is the last time he’s eaten? Ryan can’t remember.   
  
Dallon gingerly sets his injured hand palm up on Ryan’s thigh, the other wrapped loosely around his waist. 

Ryan almost laughs. Dallon’s prediction was wrong, once again, on something small as their sleeping positions. He’s starting to think that there was something in Ryan’s face that screamed ‘I can totally heal you bro’ and this whole time all Dallon’s been doing is trying to keep up a facade while stringing Ryan along. He wouldn’t be entirely surprised. 

“Are you okay sitting like that?” Ryan asks at the same time that Dallon exclaims, “There’s something written on your neck.”

  
  
“What?” They say simultaneously, and then Ryan blinks hard. “You first.”

  
  
“Thirty nine. It says it on your neck.”

“Oh!” Ryan says, twisting stupidly (stupidstupidstupid boy you can’t see the back of your own neck), causing his whole body to scream in pain. He pretends that he isn’t suffering. “She wrote something there but I was busy worrying about you-”   
  


“You were?” Dallon says incredulously. As if he didn’t know.

  
  
Ryan ignores him, sniffing. “Thirty nine?”

“What could that mean?”

  
  
Ryan doesn’t feel like thinking. What the hell?

  
  
  


Oh.

  
  
“Thirty nine days.” Ryan says, quietly. “She-answered my question.”

  
  
“We’ve been here for a month.” Dallon says, tightening his hold around Ryan.

  
  
“And a week.” Ryan adds, lightheaded, “Oh god, it feels like it’s been forever.”

  
  
Dallon rests his cheek on Ryan’s hair as his vision starts to go black again. Ryan can barely hear what Dallon whispers before he drops off. 

“Forever and a week.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> c o m m e n t :P
> 
> also yes I know its cringy don't make fun of me too much


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For people confused about the timing of everything. Here is what I wrote verbatim at like 2 in the morning after I posted the last chapter.
> 
> 'Hey so Ryan was in the eternal waiting room for 5 days before Dallon came. When Dallon got there it was about a day in all. In the initial holding cell for a day. Went to the thingy thing. He passed out and slept for two days. Dallon has even less of a grasp on time than Ryan does because he so often chooses to leave it. After a while he got concerned but he didn't realize how long he was out. Okay and then I skipped a little bit (lots a bit) between that chapter and the next. I tried to show that by saying they established a routine. I needed them to be there for a while ya know? They have a lot of people there and though Ryan has caught their interest in his uniqueness they are still processing so many people for their separate programs. Anyway they were there for a while, bored crazy bored. They just sleep a lot, eat, talk about things, and sleep more. So when Ryan was taken, Dallon did not like that his routine was messed with on top of being freaked out by a vision he saw. NOw here they are. 39 days.'
> 
> Sorry for that word vomit, I just didn't really want to re type it all lol.

He's back in the room, but he's not strapped down like the first time he'd visited. Instead he sits at the edge of the metal chair, his leg bouncing in anxiety. He made Dallon promise to try and sleep while he was gone. He doesn't quite trust him when he's by himself, but it’s not like he can do anything about it. When Dallon was taken the first time, Ryan could feel a semblance of the panic that Dallon felt when it was him being ripped away. But with his knowledge that Dallon will most likely be given back (and with the coaching that Ryan had given him to just do what they say, aka, no attacking), he’s not about to attempt to bust the walls down or anything. 

Dallon has only been taken twice, and each time after he’s been so gooey and out of it most of the information Ryan’s gotten has been useless. 

“Ryan.” Dallon said the first time, draped over the entirety of Ryan’s side. “I have a secret!!!!!”

Ryan rolled his eyes. “Some secrets should be kept secret, Dal.”

  
  
“ _ I love you _ . Isn’t that a neato secret?! I love you!”

“No you don’t.” Ryan said sharply, trying to help him sit up, hating every second of the whole situation. “What did they do to you? What did you do in there?!”

“They told me to- um. They asked me alot alot alot of questions.” Dallon motioned with his hands, like a ‘have you seen a fish this big?’ gesture. “So many!!”

“What did they do to you?” Ryan repeated, this version of his friend so much more unbearable than any other. “Stop drooling on me.” 

  
  
Ryan tried to push the dazed man off his shoulder but instead he slid down his torso until he came to rest with Ryan’s legs as a pillow. 

“They made me drink this silver stuff.” He said, as his eyes rolled back to look at the ceiling as he settled his head in Ryan’s lap “Now my brain is fuzzy. I love you.”

  
  
He added the last bit with a giggle. 

Oh, Ryan thought, That’s why. The stuff they give them to drink must be some sort of inhibition blocker. Ryan felt its effects, but he didn’t quite get them as bad as Dallon.

  
  
“Do you remember what you told them?”

“I can see stuff in my head. They always called me crazy, 'til they sent me away. You think I’m crazy, too. You aren’t going to send me away are you?”

“I’d send you out of here, if I could.” Dallon was sweating, so Ryan pushed his hair back over his forehead. “But I would like to come with you.”

  
  
Dallon closed his eyes. “I’m hungry.”   


  
The rest of the conversation had been along the same thread, and when Dallon woke up after he’d rested, he didn’t remember anything.

In the present, now, Ryan’s still waiting. His past two visits after the first one have been more...normal. If only in the way he isn’t strapped down, just watched so vigilantly he doesn’t dare even stand up. They probably wanted to see if he was violent like Dallon before they decided to even give him a sliver of a chance to act up. He won’t unless something drastic happens. 

In his second visit, they’d brought him a bloody, dying rabbit with a gash from its neck to its stomach. He healed it with no pain, which was sort of incredible. The next visit they put a weird-looking(and heavy, ouch) helmet on his head, a band around his arm, and an IV...thing in his wrist and had him do the same with a broken-legged dog. He had the sense to reset the leg before attempting to heal it, and it went smoothly. (He can mend BONES!?!?)

The whole time when wearing the helmet, the woman(it’s always the same woman) was monitoring… something on the multiple screens behind him. Brain waves or something. Doesn’t necessarily matter to Ryan if he can’t make sense of it on the first try.

Either way, it appears that healing animals is really his limit. Ryan has resigned to being a badass magic vet. If they ever get out of here, Ryan can just open a practice. He’ll have Dallon forge him a license or something. He’d probably be good at that sort of thing.

“Good evening Mr.Seaman.” The lady says, sliding through the door that a shadow holds open for her. “We have an exciting experiment today.”

  
  
“Oh, joy.” Ryan says dryly, not particularly concerned right now. Just hungry.

  
  
She laughs as she passes behind him. It isn’t cruel.  _ She _ isn’t cruel. It’s disorienting, because if you can look past her outlandish outfit and her technically modified voice, she’s a human. How can someone so seemingly normal(ish) be capable of starving other people to death and delirium?

Ryan thinks he’s going crazy. Like, he’s legitimately spiraling. Dallon might already be clinically insane, but Ryan’s at least on the porch steps. His mind is often blank, completely. Even when in Dallon’s company, there’s points where they’re just breathing together, their pressed-together shoulders the only thing anchoring him in reality. He’s beginning to realize he needs him.

And that’s- it’s-

It’s a  _ control _ thing. There’s no point to this, so it’s definitely a control thing. They’re going to beat them down, condition them to be afraid of the shadows, and offer them kindness and treats( extra bars, freeze-dried apples, salves for Dallon’s nearly ‘healed’ injuries, sleep masks to block out the lights and fight off headaches) when they are obedient and good. 

When Ryan’s _not_ astral projecting to the void, he’s trying to figure this all out. He took a psychology class in college, so he’s basically an expert. Ha.

Isolation is one of the most used methods of brainwashing. Well, he’s isolated from the outside word, but developing a codependent relationship with his cellmate. That’s one thing that tripped Ryan up at first… why would they give him something to keep him sane (relatively, anyway)? And then he realized why when Dallon was taken the second time. The whole time he was on edge, anxiety in each corner of his mind, counting the seconds until he was given back. Of course he questioned why immediately when Dallon actually got back and was annoying as all hell, but that’s it. Dallon is a way to control Ryan. Ryan is a way to control Dallon. Just because they’re letting them stay together now, doesn’t mean they can’t take it away before he can blink. 

Just the thought makes Ryan want to throw up. And it’s annoying. They did this on purpose. They  _ knew _ that Dallon already was attached to Ryan, so the rest would be easy, just stick them together for a few weeks and they’re set. Their attachment to each other tangles both of them up in marionette strings, easily manipulated by anyone who decides to take control. 

Ryan’s tried to be more curt with him, when talking about him. He’s trying to convince them it won’t work. That Dallon isn’t proper leverage.

It’s a lie. 

“How are you feeling?”

  
  
Ryan shrugs, playing with his own hands. “Okay.”

  
  
“Any light-headedness? Any incidents with Mr. Weekes?”

  
  
“Not since he burnt his hands. I’ve been working on them slowly, not recently.” 

  
  
“Any pain left over?”

  
  
“No.”

  
  
“Good.” She jots this all down. Ryan stares at the pen and paper with a foreign longing. He’s missed being able to write things down. Granted, he’d usually take notes in his phone, but getting down his thoughts nonetheless. “Good.”

“Should I be worried?”   


  
“We think we’ve drawn some conclusions about you. We want to make sure they are correct before we proceed.”

  
  
“Proceed to  _ what _ ?”

She taps her ear. “We are ready.”

  
  
Ryan repeats his question. 

“To really test your limits.”

“Uh?” Ryan makes a vaguely concerned noise and she just laughs again, tapping his shoulder in reassurement.

“Not today, I think. Ah. You all are so fascinating.”

  
  
Ryan doesn’t like that. “What do you mean?”

  
  
“Nearly all of you are unique. There’s no direct classification, you all have a hodge-podge of abilities.”

  
  
Ryan must look confused. She elaborates.

  
  
“Like you’d drawn them from a scrabble bag, there are some rarer than others. You would be, in that context, what appears to be a lone x. And so many of you don’t even know the extent of your own abilities.”

  
  
“I didn’t even know I had any.”

“That is common.” She says. Ryan wonders why she tells him anything at all. “Though we haven’t been able to find one magic user with exactly the same abilities, there are three divisions.”

  
  
Ryan’s mind flashes back to when Dallon had used that term. Not for the first time, Ryan wonders where Dallon  _ really  _ came from.    
  


She gets something through her supposed earpiece, her fingers raise to her ear again and she says- “Clear.”   
  


The door opens and the room is suddenly full. Ryan’s consciousness jumps around sometimes. That probably isn’t normal but

“As I was saying-” She’s saying now, Ryan’s eyes snap to attention. Three people stand, uncomfortable, in front of him. They’re dirty, malnourished, scared, tired. 

They look broken. Is that what he looks like? Yeah, he knows what he looks like, of course he does, but- the change was gradual.

This is jarring.

“There are three main divisions of magic, determined by the chemical make-up of their blood. We believe that you react different to healing each one of them.”

“Oh-”   
  
She hovers over the girl on the left, her black hair is growing out brown at the roots, her eyes are large and sunken. “Dark. Their magic is like quicksand. It won’t cut you, but it will drown you, put you to sleep, suffocate you."

She touches the shoulder of the girl, maneuvering past her shadow with a huff.

She gestures to the redheaded teen boy in front of her.

"Natural. Their magic is of your sort, usually plant magic or simple healing magic. It's not very impressive."

The boy has enough in him to shoot her a dirty look.

She moves on.

"Light." She says, and Ryan recognizes the woman… It's Breezy.

She looks as if she were snapped in half, the light behind her eyes completely gone. Ryan's heart hurts for her. But she won’t meet his eyes.

"Light is hot, sharp, and deadly. Mesmerizing as it may be, light magic is dangerous. But...you know that, don’t you?”

  
  
Ryan blinks, holding his abdomen. He feels sick.

“I’m sorry Mr.Seaman.”

  
  
That is never good, premature apologies. Ryan watches numbly as she fetches a scalpel from a drawer in the back. He cracks his swollen knuckles, attempting to distance himself from what he knows he’s about to see. 

  
  
The white shadow behind the girl with the dyed black hair grabs both of her shoulders, holding her in place. She doesn’t struggle. The woman pulls blue surgical gloves over her skin-tight satin ones, then squeezing an expanse of skin on her victim’s forearm, slashes down. She yelps, but clamps her own mouth shut. In the context of this place, the wound could have been a lot worse. 

It’s around two inches, welling with blood. She steps back and Ryan pauses a few moments before he stands up, slowly. Not out of trepidation of backlash, but out of fear that he’ll just collapse. 

The woman notices, fishes a peppermint out of her pocket, hands it to him. He isn’t sure how it’ll help but he isn’t going to turn it down. He puts it on his tongue, not able to enjoy it, really. Bummer. First thing that he’s had in a month or so that wasn’t freeze-dried. 

He readies himself mentally as he approaches his patient, and she looks at him with reproach. A jolt of alarm passes through him. 

_ -it’s only me- I’m just like you- I promise I promise I promise- _

He doesn’t say anything out loud, only grimacing as he places three fingers along the wound. She hisses in pain, hitting her thigh. 

Ryan doesn’t feel anything at first and he thought that it was  _ working  _ for once, but then he realizes his fingers are going numb. He can’t feel them. Oh  _ god _ . Great. Amazing.

It takes all of his willpower to keep going when he loses feeling in his arm up to his elbow. When he finally drops off, there’s still a red scab left over the pseudo-sutured skin.

“Sorry.” He says guiltily, clutching his dead elbow. “I’m sorry, I hope it doesn’t hurt that much.”

She looks somewhat shocked, from her arm, to him and back, and back. “You- people can do that?”

“I’m sorry it wasn’t- 

“What do you feel?” The woman cuts him off, pen readied over her paper. “How did it affect you?”

  
  
“I- I lost feeling in my arm, that’s all.”

  
  
“Ah.” She says, voice alight. She finds this interesting. Ryan wants to deck someone in the face. Not that he exactly has the ability to right now. “Fascinating! Okay. We want to try something.”

  
  
“I could gather that.” Ryan spits acidly, “Is this really necessary? Can’t we just wait until someone gets hurt naturally?”

  
  
“They don’t, in general.” She says, “Your friend is reckless, and it’s quite amusing to watch you two together. You’re so opposite.”

  
  
“Well I’m glad we’re entertaining.” Ryan laughs but not really, and she slices the boy’s arm in the same breath. She gives Ryan another peppermint. 

  
  
_ Dog treats _ . He thinks. They’re just another undiscovered species of animal, to train and utilize. 

The wound is similar, and the boy’s eyes are far more trusting now that he knows Ryan isn’t exactly there to hurt them(he obviously doesn’t understand that it’s because of him he’s hurt in the first place). Can he make them  _ stop _ hurting? Hopefully.

He uses his other hand. When they make contact, his numb fingers tingle and Ryan coughs in surprise. It takes around 15 seconds for the wound to heal completely, and by the time he’s done his other hand is almost back to normal.

  
  
“Uh-”

  
  
“What happened?” The woman asks eagerly, and Ryan huffs.

  
  
“I mean- it made it better? I have feeling back-”

  
  
“Yes!” She says, uncharacteristically enthusiastic(Ryan thinks she’d even hopped in excitement)- “I think I was right about you!”

  
  
She grabs the third scalpel and Ryan throws his hand out, “Wait, we know what it’s like when I heal Dallon, why would we need to do it again? I mean, you could bring him out here and I could work on his hands or- I dunno. Just don’t-”   


  
Breezy looks up at him. She’s not here, anymore. Not really. Not now. He can tell. 

The lack of light in her eyes makes him falter, his tongue nearly tripping on his words

“- hurt her.”

The woman pauses, tracing the outline of her surgical mask with the blade. “Fine. Take them away.” 

The shadows usher their wards out, like parents coralling their pouting kid away from a party. The woman sticks the scalpel blade down into the wooden counter along the far wall, grabs her clipboard, and starts writing frenzied sentences in earnest. After a few minutes of this, Ryan coughs. She looks up, looks surprised that he’s still there.

  
“Are you-- going to--” Ryan says stiltingly, she raises her eyebrows, prompting him to go further- “Get him?”

  
  
“Oh, no. You’re correct. There’s no point at this time in taxing your body more than needed. Did you want another peppermint?”

“No.”

  
  
_ Yes you do _

“I mean-yes. Um. Can I bring one for him too?”

  
  
“Hmm.” She holds two out on her palm. He stands up cautiously and grabs them. “I appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Seaman. We all do.”

  
  
Ryan suddenly feels icky.

“Oh?”

“You are a very important asset to us. We have big plans here, and I would like to think you’re going to be apart of it.”

  
  
“...me?”

“Do you understand what you are? What you _ have _ ?”

  
  
“No! I don’t even know what happened today. Why did it- how- I-”

“When you heal someone, you’re putting your energy into them, but you’re taking theirs out. In a few hours your body will convert the properties of their energy back into your own but-- when you put your healing natural energy into them it’s only beneficial. When taking energy in of the same caliber, like subject T509, it balanced out what you just took in.”

“Uh- so the time thing-”

  
  
“While you are inputting your energy, yes. You speed up time, only relatively of course. It doesn’t make any logical sense but watching back footage makes it appear as if we’re watching a time-lapse-- it’s quite fascinating.”

  
  
“And-”

  
  
“We have plans.” She says simply, and Ryan has an inkling that she’s  _ beaming _ under her mask. “I hope you’re excited.”

“I- I doubt I have anything to be excited about.”

  
  
“Mr.Seaman, you might be one of the only people in this whole institution who  _ does _ . I will see you soon, for a sample. Take him away.”

  
  
As he’s being taken away, Ryan closes the peppermints in his fist. He didn’t consciously decide to, but he ends up giving them both to Dallon.

  
"You're okay! What are you holding?"  
  
  


"Oh, I see your priorities. Maybe I won't show you."  
  
  
Dallon tries to peek around Ryan's shoulders and Ryan tuts.

  
“Close your eyes.” 

  
  
Dallon bounces on his heels and stalls in his attempts to see what Ryan was hiding behind his back, obediently stilling and shutting his eyes. 

  
  
“Hold out your hands.”

  
  
“Oooh, do I get a present?”

  
  
Ryan laughs in a short puff of air, placing the candies in Dallon’s outstretched hands. Dallon literally squeals when he opens his eyes, grinning.

“You’re the  _ best _ -” he laughs with a large grin, eyes alight and excited, hugging(crashing into) Ryan before sequestering himself in a corner to lick the first peppermint in intravels. It’s adorable. It’s strange. It’s so--him. Ryan stands dumbly in the center of the room for a second or two, staring, before he follows him. Exhausted, he nudges into Dallon’s side. Dallon circles his shoulders with a long arm immediately like he was meant to be there, like this all was natural. 

Oh god. He’s falling right into step, right into line. He’s doing exactly what they want him to do. He’s letting himself be controlled. 

Dallon leans his head on top of Ryan’s affectionately. Ryan smiles.

  
  
He’s letting himself be controlled. And he doesn’t fucking care.

  
“You’ll be the death of me, Dallon.”

  
  
He snorts.“Probably.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comment and kudos to let me know you exist :))


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey my lovely lovelies, you're incredible and amazing and I love every single one of you. I hope you enjoy this chapter!!

Something is coming, something big and different. Dallon insists. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, because he’s usually wrong. 

What’s more important, more pressing, is Ryan’s declining health.

Ryan woke up this morning with a jittery heart, each beat nearly painful as it skitters through his chest. Fast, slow, fast! S l o w. Dallon eyes Ryan warily from the ground as the shorter man circles the room, his pace changing with his inner metronome.

  
  
“Should I do something stupid to get their attention? Like- I can knock out a camera or something. They’d notice us then.”

“They might hurt you, it isn't worth it,” Ryan says dismissively, leaning against a wall, trying to steady his breathing and stay himself.

“You say that all the time but they’ve never actually done it,” Dallon says, his pointed toes have been following Ryan around the room this whole time, his fingers occasionally flexing out towards him before folding themselves back into a pile on his lap. Ryan can tell that he wants to keep him safe by keeping him as close as possible, because in his mind he can protect him from harm by shielding him from anything that would dare try hurt him.

But at this point it's his failing body that will kill him, not anything else.

"I know that they'll use you against me." Ryan says and Dallon's face reddens, his eyes widening even more. He pulls his legs into a butterfly stretch in a single anxious movement. 

"They said you're important, Ryan, they don't want you dead." Dallon says, his voice steady and nearly emotionless, not in any way matching his nervous and flushed face. That's how Ryan can tell he's scared. 

"I'm not going to  _ die _ , I just- it could be a panic attack. Heart symptoms are very similar to panic attacks, I'm probably fine."

"But you're also severely underweight."

"Wow, thanks." Ryan sinks to the ground, and holds up a hand to stop Dallon when he starts crawling over to him. He falls back on his heels, frustrated.

"I'm just  _ saying _ that malnutrition can lead to heart issues! Let me do something stupid so they notice that something's wrong. Please."

"You'll do it even if I tell you not to." Ryan is extremely uncomfortable. It feels as if he's barely in his own body, like he's overstaying his welcome by just existing. He wants to fall asleep, but he’s afraid that if he does he won’t wake up again. 

"If I think that you're going to be hurt, yes." Dallon says, "They'll save you, and it’s worth it.”

"I don't want you to do that, it’s dangerous for both of us-”

"I'm so scared."

He is. He's shaking, his voice is completely level, and he keeps physically stopping himself from sliding closer and reaching out, rocking back and forth and clenching and unclenching his fists. Ryan pities him for caring.

In that instant, Ryan's heartbeat spikes again and he curls in on himself, gasping sharply.

“Ryan!” Ryan's heart of plaster cracks a little along with Dallon's voice.

  
  
“I’m  _ fine, _ dumbass.” It’s not very convincing. 

“Of course you are.” Dallon says as he rises, eyeing the two visible cameras as if sizing up prey. Ryan smacks the floor, open palmed, but Dallon doesn’t even look down at him. 

" _ Don't _ ."

He doesn't respond. Instead, he gestures at the camera over the door, and in a flash, it's smoking and dead. Dallon hops a little in excitement because he's always loved rebellion.

"You're so stupid," Ryan says and he means it. His heart rate slows again.

"It's a necessary evil." Dallon responds and Ryan doesn't really have a comeback for that. He'd like to believe that he would on a normal day but today is not normal. Dallon sits but doesn't get any closer to Ryan and he appreciates it. He feels foreign, floaty.

He doesn’t like this. He likes knowing what comes next. He likes routine, he likes order, he likes knowing that everything will be okay. 

  
  
Before, he didn’t care much about the routine of things. The two of them, him and Tess, were pretty adventurous in the suburban middle class American type of way. They’d go hiking, take midnight runs to target, box dye their hair in public bathrooms, do stupid dangerous things, climb bridges and sneak into abandoned areas to take pictures. Despite everything that could have gone wrong, at the end of the day, they were  _ safe _ . 

Oh, Tessa. He wonders if she’s moved on, or even suspected where he’s gone. 

  
  
  


It doesn’t matter.

  
  
  


Now,  _ now _ , routine means safety. Each day being the same spells out no surprises, and no surprises means Dallon and he get to go to sleep and wake up and be okay. 

He suspected if the routine broke it would have been someone’s fault, other than his. But this- this is all him. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He forgets he exists for a second, but he’s dragged out of that mind space by Dallon's concerned voice. 

“Ryan, it’s okay, breathe. Please."

  
  
Dallon is still feet away from him, sitting now, cross-legged and pale. Maybe this is just a panic attack, or maybe he’s having a panic attack on top of whatever was happening before because now Ryan’s mind is foggy and desperate. He’s drowning in it. The past or the future or the present doesn’t matter right now. It’s all bad. 

“It’s  _ not  _ okay.” Ryan gets out finally, and it’s more of a wheeze.

  
  
“I  _ know _ .” Dallon says exasperatedly, shaking his hands out at his sides “But it will be.”

“What if it  _ won’t _ ?” Ryan asks, shrilly, “What if it never is again? What if we’re here forever? What if I die here?! What if-”

  
  
Ryan can’t breathe. He feels sweaty and gross, his chest is pounding so violently he wouldn’t be surprised if Dallon could see his heart’s outline, like in the old cartoons. Ryan can’t breathe. Dallon looks utterly lost. Ryan can’t breathe, Ryan can’t breathe.

“What if what?”   


  
Ryan throws his hands up. He feels like there are bumblebees in his throat, his chest, and his stomach. 

_ What if they take you what if they take you and hurt you what if I have to be here alone without a way to even put myself out of my misery?! _

Ryan keels over and dry heaves, because he doesn’t have anything in his stomach. It hurts and now his mouth tastes like blood. Ryan can’t breathe. He wants to cry and scream. He can’t do either, he’s broken and overreacting and why the hell is he doing this?

Dallon bounces closer to him, his resolve to respect Ryan’s wishes finally broken. “Do you want water?”

“Just get the fuck away from me!!” Ryan screams, before he retches again. He tastes bile. He tastes blood. 

Dallon stands up, and Ryan thinks he might be crying. 

“If you don’t come down here  _ right now _ , and help him I’ll take this camera out too. I bet you  _ love  _ watching us, don’t you? I bet it’s fucking enteratining to treat us like pitbulls readying for a dog fight! But at some point you need to take care of us, or you won’t fucking _ win,  _ will you??”

  
  
Ryan isn’t entirely sure they can actually hear what he’s saying, but it’s sweet nonetheless. Maybe Ryan’s love language is verbal abuse on his behalf, because it’s sure as hell not physical touch. 

“You’re fucking sick! You said he was important, didn’t you? Then  _ help him! _ ”

  
  
“Dal- Stop, it’s not going-”

With no preamble, Dallon violently blasts the other camera and the whole room lights up this time. Ryan covers his eyes, but Dallon stands, unruffled and determined and hand still raised. He looks like a superhero (Ryan would be captivated if he wasn’t so upset), confident and sure, but inwardly, he was upset enough to miscalculate. Ryan knows he didn’t mean to do that. It was dangerous. That’s what Dallon said. Too much is dangerous. 

“Well, they’ll come eventually.” Dallon says mildly, finally dropping his arm, insecurity seeping back into his bones. He’s still shaking. 

“I- yeah- great- thats EXACTLY what I wanted today.”

  
  
“It’s what you need.” Dallon won’t look at him.

  
  
“I-I-I- asked you not to!”

  
  
“I don’t care.” He addresses Ryan’s shoulder.

“You’re such a  _ jerk _ .”

  
  
“I just want you to be alive tomorrow!”

  
  
“I don’t want you to be  _ taken away from me _ !” Dallon’s wide shocked eyes meet his, and Ryan wants to punch him. He doesn’t have time to.

  
  
The door opens with a hiss, and two towering shadows make a beeline towards Dallon. Ryan’s hyperventilation reaches a crest and he sucks at the air around him to fill his lungs. He’s basically a useless, gasping, shivering lump. 

  
  
As one of the shadows grabs Dallon’s arm, Dallon pipes up pleasantly, “Thanks for taking the trip down here, guys. My dear friend over here is sick-  _ ow! _ ”

  
  
“Dallon?!” Ryan can’t really see much, but he does see Dallon get wrenched violently to the side. 

“You really need to listen to me.” Dallon says sensibly. Ryan can’t quite comprehend what he’s doing. This doesn’t feel real. “If you don’t, I’ll cut your head off.”

  
  
“Dallon, stop it!”  _ Can he do that? He can’t do that. Can he? _

  
“Look at him.” Dallon says, and his voice is different now, not any louder, or deeper, but it’s somehow  _ commanding _ in a way Ryan can’t quite categorize. Ryan looks up in time to see both of the shadows turn in time; four deep soulless cavities simultaneously pointed at him. He shivers. “You can’t risk it. Can you?”

  
  
Both of the figures suddenly seem unsure, stuttering physically, slowing to a stop. 

The speakers crackle. Everything is terrible and loud and overstimulating, this isn’t real, he can’t have possibly just done that. 

A steady woman’s voice comes over the intercom “Initiating lockdown, Sector 3, Cell 5. Coordinator and medic required. Clear the area.”

  
  
“Thank you very much.” Dallon says, as if this were a little business meeting, and not the end of the world. He’s still being held by the two shadows, who are still staring unflinchingly at Ryan, who is still struggling to breathe. “It’s going to be  _ okay _ , Ry.”

  
  
“What  _ is _ okay, anymore? None of this is  _ okay _ . The moment we stepped into this goddamn place, ’okay’ flew out the window!!!”

“ _ You make me okay. _ ” He says, calm as all hell but intense like crazy, and Ryan doesn’t have time to process  _ that _ because real human people, flustered looking behind their glasses and their masks, basically bust the door down. It’s obvious that they’re not called in often because both of them stand in the doorway for a few seconds, unsure what to do, before one of them rushes to Dallon and the other to Ryan, scooping him up in his arms like he was a sleepy child and carrying him away. Ryan’s eyes fall closed by themselves and he forgets to worry about Dallon. 

He forgets he’s even alive at all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> woot woot, something big is coming!
> 
> Also like legit QUESTiON quESItION pls answer: the majority of my readers are okay with some cute lil romance, right? Like I'm writing the characters and not the real people-- I've consciously made an effort to make them into characters and not too similar . Just wanna hear ur thoughts!!
> 
> Remember to comment and kudos if u haven't already!! Lets get this fic on the top!!

**Author's Note:**

> i m a g i n e:
> 
> Everyone looking for Idkhow content in 2020 who read this whole thing left a kudos and a comment :))))))


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